Viscosity
by sydney gray
Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my oneshot ‘Simple’. AddisonAlex, strong mentions of AddisonMark, AddisonDerek.
1. Yesterday Threw Everything At Me

**Viscosity**

Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, strong mentions of Addison/Mark, Addison/Derek, eventual Alex/Izzie references. Callie/Addison friendship, etc. Spoilers up to Some Kind of Miracle.

Rating: T.

Author's note: I am an Addison fan first, which is the biggest thing about anything I write about Grey's Anatomy. The other thing is I like to stay as canon as possible, so nothing will be wildly out of the realms of possibility or even probability. And reviews are love! Thank you for the warm response to my previous Addison/Alex story, it's definitely inspired this one.

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Chapter One: Yesterday Threw Everything at Me

Then there was the hangover—emotional, physical, whatever it was, and when the wake-up call came at 4AM, just like it did every day, because Addison hated few things more than being late, she convinced herself for a minute that the phone had actually exploded. Instinctively, one arm reached for the phone and the other to the empty space on the opposite side of the bed, what wasn't taken up by her splayed legs and her clothing, which she clearly hadn't felt compelled to do much with last night. Last night, last night, last night—she searched her internal database to take a personal inventory. Mark, Derek, Karev, and then she was with it again and could answer the phone with an appropriate amount of alertness.

Good morning, this is your wake-up call, the overly perky recorded voice on the other end of the line said. That voice never had to deal with a hangover or the emotional fallout of a long night or a long life. It could call people at 4AM and chipperly inform them it was time to get up and start all over again. She had a surgery scheduled at 9AM, which was uncommon after an already-too long shift the day before, but sometimes surgeries—especially pre- and neonatal surgeries—could not wait for surgeons to get full nights of sleep. Her full night of sleep almost always consisted of three or four hours, and everything else was sheer muscle memory.

Trying to get up, she fell off the bed, taking half of the comforter and her shed clothing from the night before with her, and in the tangle of sheets on the floor, she burst into laughter. There was something strangely comical to her life, a life spent in a hotel, halfway between settling and moving on. That was what summed her life—halfway between settling and moving on. It had been that way since moving to Seattle, since coming halfway across the country for a man who didn't care whether she stayed or went. The closest she'd come to stability on this side of the country was living in Derek's trailer with him, and that had aired on the side of ridiculous too. The memory of this made her giggle too, how awkward and _tame_ it was, how comatose and filled with façade, like they were strangers trying to step into the lives of people they knew from afar.

She reached out to pull the rest of the comforter off the bed, and her shoes came flying at her and landed, hitting her legs first, and then plopping to the floor. Maybe she would go for broke with the messy thing. Maybe she would take the perfectly drawn Etch-a-Sketch life of hers and shake it up until it was a blank slate, and then she'd redraw. It wasn't a simple solution, no matter how simple it seemed. Simple—there was that word again. She didn't even know what it meant any more. As she struggled to stand up, there was a knock at the door. She hadn't ordered room service—and anyway, it was too early for that—and her second thought was that it was Callie, who, for a few days, had come to her door so that they could go to the hospital together. People in transition needed other people in transition to cling to, and so they had clung. And then Callie, at least in some fashion, had gotten her act together and taken off without Addison. Addison couldn't resent her for it. Vegas, baby, all the way.

"Coming?" she called to whoever was on the other side of the door. Maybe it was Callie. Maybe she and George were over, which seemed like a likely outcome to that whole thing, but maybe that was just Addison's natural cynicism—no, _realism_, she preferred. Cynicism was Derek's word for her. Her clothes still on the floor around her, Addison had to stop to pull a sheet high enough under her arms to cover the fabric of her bra, and she wobbled her way to the hotel room door. To see Callie would be good, because Callie would understand what it was like to be overwhelmingly smitten with a man a few years her junior, not just age-wise but career-wise, and Addison hated that word, _smitten_, because it made her feel juvenile. Juvenile she'd have to be though, because that's what it was—butterflies and inane fantasies about kissing him in the supply closet. She stopped at the door and pressed her hand against it, leaning in to look into the peephole, and then she realized there was no peephole.

When she pulled the door open, still a little wobbly and probably dehydrated, she squinted into the light and a pair of familiar hands presented her with breakfast. Or what appeared to be breakfast—if breakfast was two hot dogs, covered in everything, and a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam container. "Everything else was closed," Mark said, "and I know you always get up at 4."

She took the food from him grudgingly, but there was something bittersweet in it. There had always been something bittersweet between her and Mark, the lost history, the long years of memories. He had been there, even when he didn't need to be, when Derek's long hours kept him away, or Derek spent a week not talking to her. It was Mark there with the broom, sweeping up the pieces and making sure she had the glue with which to put herself back together. It was not true that she wouldn't have survived without Mark's friendship, but it was true that it would have been harder. Mark was Addison's friend before he was her lover, and sometimes she forgot that in the wash of his advances.

He was also Derek's friend before he was Addison's, and maybe that was what kept the wall still so high. He was still the bridge she dare not cross over. It still seemed like a betrayal to be with him, even if Derek couldn't care less about it. It was a violation of every code of ethics she'd rebuilt in herself. To go back to Mark wasn't just settling—it was a violation of a hundred and one proclamations she'd made over the last year. It made her a hypocrite.

"Nice mascara … thing," Mark said, filling Addison's silence. God, she hadn't even looked in the mirror to see how much damage there had been from the night before. It was probably all over her pillows and worse, all over her face, and she raised a fist to try to wipe some of the makeup away, but it was useless. Last night had left an indelible mark that wouldn't go anywhere until she could get some soap on her face.

"Mark, what are you doing here?"

"I thought we could squeeze in a quickie before going to the hospital. I can give you a ride."

The double entendre was not lost on her. Mark functioned primarily in double entendres, and she raised an eyebrow at him but nevertheless let him into her hotel room. "There will be no quickies," she said, tightening her fist around the place where her sheet bunched, just above her breasts. Mark was one to suspect homeless people of wanting to sleep with him, and Addison had no doubt that he could view her bed-headed Farrah-Fawcett-eyed hungover nakedness as a sign she wanted to sleep with him, and she stayed stiffly by the door, ready to shoo him out if he put her into that position. Or if he tried to put her into any position at all. It didn't help her case that they'd had sex more than once in that hotel bed. And on that hotel carpet. And—awkwardly—in that hotel chair. Freedom, as they said, was just another word for nothing left to lose. She had had nothing left to lose.

"Well, we can make it longer, if you want. I'm up for anything you want to do."

He had moved over to the table past her bed, close enough to see her clothing all over the floor, and wouldn't it had been supreme to have Karev walk out of the bathroom just then, just like Mark had once done to Derek? Karev, wet from the shower, only in a towel, or maybe he'd be comfortable enough around her to walk around completely naked, and he probably had excellent thighs; he seemed like the sort of man to have great thighs, like maybe he used to play soccer in high school, and great thighs meant great leg strength, which usually meant—

"Addison, you're turning a little red."

A little red and a little flustered, but, "Not because of you, Mark."

"Admit it, you were picturing me naked."

She was certainly picturing someone naked, but it was far from Mark Sloan. Truth was, she'd thought about whether or not her attraction to Karev was rooted in his resemblance to Mark, but Karev's ego and desire to go into plastic surgery were where the similarities began and ended. Mark had never held a premature baby in his arms and helped nurse it back to life. And Mark had only ever been able to look at her and make her melt in the heyday of their affair, and the heyday was exactly that, a _day_, during the afterglow but before the aftermath. Karev and his 'because he was rude to you', well, that was enough for Addison.

"I was picturing you leaving, actually."

"Addison."

Addison, Addison, Addison. She knew that tone of voice, and she knew exactly what it meant. She knew she was treating him unceremoniously, especially for people who had slept together, who had been friends, who had said 'I love you' more than just after sex. There was a time after Derek left, a morning over coffee, when he looked at her and he told her that she was a beautiful woman, and she told him she loved him, and she'd meant it in that moment. That was all that had mattered then, those moments, and they were enough to tide her over until the missing Derek started to kill her.

She could get lost in the moments with Mark. She had to be guarded. She had to be strong, because sleeping with him again was forever falling into that trap. Four more days, and then she was obligated to him, but then again— she owed him nothing. There were plenty of promises Addison Montgomery had made and then broken over the years. This didn't have to be any different. And yet, there he was, staring at her from the other side of the hotel room with that puppy dog look he had perfected years ago, the one that made most women melt. Addison was not most women.

"Mark," she finally said.

He took that as his cue to come across the room to her, back to where she stood by the door, her heel holding it open, her hand keeping her sheet on, her bra strap falling down her shoulder, the hot dogs in her free hand. "Addison," he said again, his voice even lower, and she had to keep herself from laughing at him. He was so quick to turn his sex drive on, or it was possible it was never off, and he bent down to kiss her shoulder, a lingering, wet, warm kiss, and then he slid his hand under her bra strap and pushed it back up.

Normally that would have worked, whatever the hell _normally_ was. _Normally_ only applied to the time before she'd found her closure on all things Mark and Derek. Normally was the space where her insecurity existed, and even though she stood in front of him, mascara pooled under her eyes, she wasn't going to give into him. "Mark, please go," she said, "I have an early surgery."

He pulled back to look at her, his eyes registering marginal surprise, and then he put his hands up in the air in defeat. "Four days though, Addie. Four." Four days my ass, she thought, and she closed the door behind him.

…

There was a time once, a long time ago, when Addison and Derek used to stay up to watch late-night horror movies. After he packed her things but before he left for good, relocating to only-God-knew-where, she came home—and _home_ had become such an inappropriate word for a place that was unwelcome to her, because he had become unwelcoming—to find him sitting there on the couch, watching _Jaws_ like she had never existed. That was their favorite, _Jaws, _and she came in the front door and started to go up the stairs to grab a couple of pairs of jeans and her last pair of shoes left behind, and the sound of it made her stop.

He was sitting on the couch, his legs extended, feet propped up on the coffee table, something he never would have done had she been there. He said nothing to her, even when she came to the doorway, and his eyes flickered involuntarily to where she stood, muscle memory, but he didn't meet her eyes, and he said nothing to her. This was _our_ thing, she wanted to say to him, but she had ruined every last one of their things, and when he did speak, it was to say, "Go back to Mark," and that was how she knew they would never be the same again.

…

"Izzie Stevens hates me," Callie announced at the attending desk to whomever would listen. That was her way, to be overstated without being an exaggeration, and Addison took a long sip of her sawdust-like coffee and raised her eyebrows at her. Callie, in a way, reminded Addison of Addison, and she liked that about her. Callie was the Addison Addison wished she could be—purposeful, strong, a little insecure sometimes, but absolutely prepared to put someone in a chokehold or call them on their bullshit, whatever the occasion required. "And I am really tired of it."

"I told Mark we could try dating if he could go sixty days without sex," Addison said. This was their usual way, the presentation of information, just like they were in a patient's room, the digestion, and then the vomiting of advice or sympathy or whatever was warranted. "We only have four days left."

Callie was silent for a moment, and Addison watched her face. Sometimes Addison didn't understand what Callie was doing with George O'Malley, who balked from harsh words, who could, at times, be something of a baby, and who seemed in many ways Callie's inferior. And then she felt bad for thinking it—because she knew there were those on George's side who thought similar things about Callie. There would always be those people, the ones on either side, prepared to take stands and invalidate anyone's choice. There were those who wondered why Addison would mess around with Mark, and there were those who, she was sure, wondered why Derek would mess around with Addison. Or Meredith. There would always be those passing judgment, and Addison decided, as she stood in front of Callie, to suspend judgment. If George made Callie happy, if Meredith made Derek happy, if sex made Mark happy—who was she to judge?

"That's strange, because." Callie started and stopped and then shook her head, as though trying to shake something back into the forefront of her memory. She laughed and shrugged and said, "I don't remember. I thought someone said something. It's no big deal."

Addison frowned but didn't press it. There were enough rumors circulating around the hospital to make it feel like high school, and Addison wasn't going to pander to them if she could help it. It was like being back at medical school, where every day there were new hypotheses about who was zooming whom. She didn't care. She had never cared. "If he loves you, it doesn't matter what Stevens thinks, you know," Addison said.

Callie shrugged, and Addison thought she could see a trace of the bravado that was integral to every surgeon's personality. It was essential to be able to do that, the shrugging off, because there was so much they had to shrug off on a daily basis. This wasn't surgery, however, this was _life_. This was love. This was getting up every morning and making the right or the wrong choices and then dealing with them. "I think it does matter, which is the scary thing," Callie said. "And I—"

"Dr. Montgomery?" She didn't have to think about to whom the voice belonged, because the second he opened his mouth, her stomach lurched, like heartburn. Or maybe it was heartache. She promptly dismissed that thought—she was already getting in way too far above her head, but there was something excited that lived inside of her, like a kid who knew he'd be going to Disneyland soon, and then—did she just compare Alex Karev to Disneyland? She really was in over her head.

He was behind her, and Callie's eyes widened marginally, and her mouth twisted into a teasing, knowing grin before she excused herself and moved away from the admitting station. "Dr. Karev," Addison said before turning around, and then she made her pivot, preparing herself to face him. She didn't feel foolish for the night before, not like she'd felt about the kiss, and when she met his eyes, he standing close enough to her to touch her, she knew that she'd been right to turn down Mark. And she knew she'd been right to say something to Karev. She'd just been absolutely right, and that realization felt like she was finally unscrewing the vise around her chest.

"I was wondering," he said, and her eyes were fixated on his mouth, which probably did a lot of kissing, and it looked like it was made for exactly that—for kissing, and for other things, and he kept talking, either oblivious to her attention or fully cognizant and enjoying it, "if you'd let me scrub in this morning."

His arm was resting on the top of the admitting station, his hand near her elbow, and when his fingers brushed the material of her white coat, she wondered if her face reflected the way she felt about it. It was the woman in her responding to him, but it was the doctor in her that opened her mouth and said, "You haven't seen a patent ductus arteriosus yet, have you?"

"Nope," he said, his fingertips still brushing her lab coat. There was something so easy about it, nothing that felt awkward or wrong, like it did with Mark, and she hated all of the comparisons, but they were so obvious to her at times. Karev, with his soft pout, unintentional, Addison thought, as though it was just the natural curve of his mouth, and if knew the kinds of fantasies she entertained about that mouth, he might have been appalled—or worse, _flattered_, Addison's least favorite word.

"Then yes, I want you to scrub in," she said.

"I'm glad you're talking to me today."

"I learned my lesson last time."

"You mean you don't want a reason to be in a supply closet with me?"

She didn't have an answer, and—_ow_—that was her stomach, her heart, her pancreas too probably, and what was it about Alex Karev that made her body respond that way? If he kept on, she'd get all hot and bothered, and she had to focus. Focus, focus, focus, she told herself, but she knew her cheeks were pink, and she had to fight the urge to put her hand to his cheek, to move her hips a little closer to him. This was why hospitals discouraged relationships between coworkers. They had things to do that were far too important to let themselves get distracted by such ridiculous things as sexual tension. She was a woman though, and her very womanly body was going to do exactly what it wanted, no matter what her brain told her.

There were a hundred things she wanted to say too, but he looked so amused by her inability to respond that when she opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out but a stuttering of singular personal pronouns and an embarrassed laugh. "You're so cute," he said, his voice low, and his hand cupped her elbow.

How he did that to her, she didn't know, and his hand was hot even through the material of her coat. She still couldn't pinpoint the moment he became a man and not just an intern she was obligated to guide through the steps, and she might have said something—and she would have, given the time to work out the words in her head, but there was Mark over his shoulder in the doorway, leaning against the frame, his arms crossed over his chest. His expression was one of dissatisfaction, and she quietly told Karev to go ahead and get ready for the surgery. Maybe he sensed her change, because he glanced over his shoulder to Mark, and when he looked back to Addison, it was with a face that said that she didn't need to take any of Mark's bullshit.

"I know," she said quietly, and she moved her arm away from his, her hand brushing his fingertips, and then they both pulled away. Karev looked over his shoulder again at Mark, whose superiority was enough to make him keep his eyes on Addison.

He was a bully, Addison decided in that moment. That was exactly what Mark was. He was a bully. He was a man with too much education, too much in the way of good looks, too many women falling all over him, and his ego turned him into a bully. She couldn't remember if he had always been that way, if she'd been blind to it because of Derek, but her distaste for him suddenly was paramount.

"What was that, Addison," he said to her, and then he closed the space between them. The nurse at the admitting desk, who had been audience to the entire thing, the tentative shared touches between Addison and Karev and now the impending confrontation between Addison and Mark, looked at them and then looked away, a rubbernecker on the highway to hell. Mark was too close to Addison for her to be comfortable, and his voice was surprisingly loud when he said, "Don't tell me you're screwing the help."

_Well_, said her brain. Karev had left her speechless, and all of the words that had gone missing in his presence were suddenly available to her in Mark's. She hated clichés—like that he had become a stranger to her, and that wasn't true of Mark; he could never be a stranger. But she understood it, the way people could think that, because he wasn't a stranger to her, but the person he was abruptly became apparent. Maybe she had been fooling herself, because he was a man who wanted her when her own husband didn't, but—_Well, _said her brain again.

"You don't ever speak to me that way again," she said, loud enough for anyone to hear. This was not a game she was going to play with Mark Sloan anymore. There would be no more rolls of the proverbial dice. Whatever they had was done, and when she turned to go, she knew he knew that.

To be continued.


	2. He Lied About Death

Viscosity

Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, with strong mentions of Addison/Mark and Addison/Derek.

Rating: T.

Author's Note: Seriously, you guys are the best. I have a thousand and one ideas for this story, so I'm going to keep on going strong, just as long as you guys keep enjoying it.

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Chapter 2: He Lied About Death

She liked to tell people she didn't believe in regret, but she believed in it with the absolutism of an atheist, the stark black and white of the revolutionary. She believed in it with all of the passion of a romantic, which she was too. It was always easier—and smarter—to tell people that regret was for fools. What was there to do with regret but wash one's hands clean of it? There was never any way to fix what had already happened. There was simply never any going back.

It was supposed to be a routine surgery. It _was_ a routine surgery. PDA was the most common premature surgery, and it was supposed to be easy. That was what she'd had so many years of training for. This was why she was the head of her own department. This was why Richard promised her everything she wanted and more. It wasn't to fix her and Derek; even Richard wasn't that self-sacrificing. It was because she was that good. In school, she'd always been the first one to answer all the questions. She'd always been on time—no, _early, _because on time was late and early was on time—and she had never missed a day of work, never missed a surgery, not for anything. Not even the morning after, when the doctor told her to take it easy or risk her own health. She'd just killed her own child, and still she was there to do her job. Addison was a doctor. That was what she did. It was the sum of her parts.

She sat on the gurney in the hallway, her back against the wall, her knees bent and her tennis shoes pressed flat against the black padding. She'd had to get away, but she learned her lesson about hiding in supply closets and crying. Someone would always find her, especially when she least wanted it. So she figured that if she sat in the open, down an unused wing, but in the open, then she couldn't be caught doing anything. Especially not crying. She just wasn't going to cry.

Like any doctor, there were some cases that got to her. She did her best to save lives, and sometimes they couldn't be saved. Sometimes a baby would hold her finger so hard that she was certain it had some life in it left—she hated calling it a _her_ or a _him_ when she was so sure it wouldn't make the night—and then it would fade away. Parents cried. Parents always cried. Even fully grown men. Sometimes it was the men who cried the most. Everyone always cried. When an adult died, it was different. There was sometimes a sense of Well, it's been a good run, but with an infant, there was never any run at all.

Karev had done his best. They had all done their bests—the anesthesiologist, whose job was supremely hard because of how difficult it was to anaesthetize infants; Karev, who had wanted to push onward, and when Addison said that they needed to declare time of death, he looked at her like he didn't recognize her. Like she couldn't be the Addison he knew. She knew how to do her job, but God, if it didn't get hard sometimes.

These were the small, jarring moments of perspective. These were the instances of clarity where it felt so ridiculous to _care_ about anything beyond them. To care about the men in her life—how laughable. How utterly silly, because the truth was that they would probably still be there tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. Some family had just had their newborn taken from them. Addison looked at her hands, and it wasn't more than an hour before when they'd been covered in the latex of surgical gloves and over that was the paint of an infant's blood.

There was a nick in her palm that she'd gotten from the first time she handled a scalpel. It was a badge of honor, even if at the time it was a mark of humiliation. If only life would continue to leave indelible scars that way—in her hands, to remind her of every mistake, every misuse of a scalpel or a surgical laser or an unkind word or an act of stupidity. If she could see it in her hands, maybe she wouldn't repeat her own history.

What terrified her was there were no mistakes made in the surgery. There was nothing she could have done better. Sometimes people just died. People? Did an infant count as a person? Did it have the decision-making capability, the propensity to hurt, the ability to feel that made it a person? Or was it just on the cusp of its humanity? It all made her head hurt.

Her ankles were cold. She started categorizing what she still felt, what hadn't gone numb in the aftermath. Her ankles, exposed to the cold hospital air by scrub pants pulled up in her position, were cold. Her hands were chapped. Her throat hurt—she couldn't remember the last time she'd had any water. It all reminded her that she still had a job to do. There was no quitting, there was no giving up, and there was no going home for the day. There was also no fixing it.

A sound down at the end of the otherwise quiet hallway alerted her, the whoosh of the opening and closing of the swinging doors, and Addison was glad she wasn't crying when Preston came around the corner, he too still in his scrubs and his trademark scrub cap. To cry in front of Preston Burke, well, that would almost feel like defeat, in the way that crying in front of one's superiors always felt. Maybe in terms of hospital hierarchy he was her peer, but when it came to everything else—ability, stability—he was far above her. He could act superior in front of the interns, even in front of Derek, but he had always been civil and kind to her, which was more than she could ask for. She respected him, which was the most anyone could ask of her.

He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded almost imperceptibly, the tiniest acquiescence, the vaguest gesture that he understood, that he had sat where she had a hundred times. That he just _got_ it. Neither of them said anything, and she stared at the poster on the other side of the wall, an insincere guide through the ways to stay healthy. Addison almost laughed—it was probably too late for anyone who'd be sitting where she was sitting.

"Do you want to come join—" she started to say to Preston, turning her head to look at him again, and she stopped as she saw that he'd brought someone with him, the sound of the entry overwhelmed by the sound of her own thoughts, too loud for this place. It was Karev, who, last she saw him, was preoccupied with scowling at her and accusing her of a half-hearted attempt at saving that child's life. As if there were _anything_ that she did medically that was half-hearted. Karev had so much to learn before he could be a surgeon, and that was something she'd forgotten in the wake of her attraction to him. He was hot-headed and brash and reminded her of, well, a little of _her_, but it was a her that had existed a long time ago, a her that couldn't exist if she was going to do her job now and well.

She watched the exchange between Preston and Karev, Karev giving Preston a nod of—was that thanks? Maybe they'd come this way, looking for her. Maybe someone had noticed she was gone—which made her think of what Karev had said, that he would notice, but that didn't seem to matter just then. She was angry with him, because he _questioned _her. Because he made her question herself. Being a doctor wasn't about questions. Being a doctor was about doing what had to be done. Preston's eyes met Addison's, and then he left the both of them alone in the hallway together.

She was ready to bite someone's head off, and it didn't matter to her if it was Alex Karev's or George O'Malley's or, hell, Richard Webber's. Or Meredith Grey's or Derek Shepherd's. She felt ready to attack anyone who came down that hallway towards her—with words of encouragement or words of admonishment, and she wasn't sure Karev would have either. She folded her hands together and rested her elbows on either knee and stared at the poster on the other side of the hall. To stay healthy, get proper exercise, it said. To stay healthy, eat proper meals. Where was the poster for how to stay a healthy baby?

Karev didn't say anything when he got to her. He looked so young underneath the fluorescent lighting, which made her think about how old she must have looked, how battered and bruised, how much his senior. It wasn't fair of her to think that what she'd been through over the last few years, God, over her _life_, outweighed whatever Karev, at his comparably young age, had been through. It didn't even resonate truthfully. She could see emotional bruises just as easily as she could see the physical subdural hematomas, and Karev had his share of those. He leaned back against the wall, partially blocking her health poster, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, as though waiting for the barrage of criticism. He was never one to accept that lightly—criticism, whether constructive or not, and his apparent readiness to take it surprised Addison.

His surprising her did not surprise her.

"What happened in there?" she asked, sounding tinny and tired, even to herself.

"You tell me," he said, and her moment of thinking he'd sit there and take her being his teacher was gone. There he was, defensive and angry again, and she didn't know who had done that to him, who had kicked him so badly that whenever the foot so much as came out, he kicked first. That was learned behavior. Someone taught him to do that.

"You're here to learn, Karev. And—" And what? And that was a learning experience? It wasn't a learning experience. It was a child's death. It was a child with a name—Helen Salinger; it was a child who existed, and now she did not. It was a learning experience, sure, but it was also a death. It wasn't up to her to humanize the patient for her intern. It was up to her to teach him what he needed to know so that he could go out into the world and do the things she'd done but better. She hadn't stopped learning yet herself, however, and she knew it. It was like a new tear in her palm, a new scalpel mark. She could feel it even if she couldn't see it.

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, debating her imminent word choice, and Karev watched her with the angry eyes of someone a decade her junior. "And if you have a problem with that, you can go back to a specialty where all you learn is how to order coffee."

Plastics. The unsaid word hung in the air like a brick. 'Go back to Mark,' was what she could have said, but someone said that to her once and broke her more pieces than she had hands to carry.

"Someone died back there," Karev exploded after the split-second processing it took him to grasp what she'd said. "A newborn _died_, and you're going to sit here and talk to me about your ex-boyfriend?"

"People die all the time," she said, and her own voice was getting increasingly louder. It was her natural response to people raising their tone with her—bite her and she would bite back. He had no right to speak to her that way. She was the one with the years of medical training behind her. She was the one who knew what she was doing. She was the attending. He was the _intern_. "People die all the time, and it's horrible, and we have to—"

"Oh, shut _up_, Addison."

She was too stunned to do anything but. Karev had detached himself from the wall and crossed his arms over his chest, and Addison didn't know what it was that made him turn Alpha male suddenly, but she liked the change. And then she hated it, the backlash of his anger, the way he was speaking to her like she was his peer or his underling. Like he was the doctor and Addison the intern.

"Did you just—"

"And you know what? I've lost a patient. I didn't just get here."

"Did you—"

"I know what it's like. I know people die. I know it doesn't get easier. Everyone always says that. But you just held that baby, you just held _Helen_ in your hands, and we were taking care of her yesterday, and then that's it. You call it, and you walk out of the OR. And then I yell at you, and you walk out of there too."

He took a deep breath and waited for her reaction, but she was still struggling to find one. She wanted to ask him who had done this to him, turned him into someone so fearless and so afraid all in the same breath. And she wanted to tell him not to talk to her that way. She was torn between wanting to get off of the gurney and going to him, wrapping her arms around him and telling him that whatever it was that made him so upset, well, she was going to fix it. But that just wasn't for her to do.

What was for her to do, and she had to keep reminding herself of this, was keep him on the surgical straight and narrow. This was Izzie Stevens' territory he was delving into, the land of being too _involved_, and Bailey would have Addison's head if she didn't straighten Karev out. This was Bailey's intern. But he was Addison's too, and the surge of protectiveness was overwhelming. She didn't know how to keep him from pain like this. She didn't know how to tell him that there was a reason she was sitting alone in the hallway, her ankles cold, her hands hurting, her throat dry. She just didn't know.

"God damnit, would you just react to something?"

She blinked. She reacted to things. She reacted to plenty of things. Didn't she? She knew she did. She wept like a baby when Derek tossed her out of her own home. And she cried for days afterwards too, sitting around with a tub of ice cream, daring her body to swell up and get fat. Go ahead, make my day, she was saying with her Ben and Jerry's. She reacted then. That was a reaction.

"I react," she said, and Karev raised his eyebrows to say, 'sure you do.' "What do you want me to do, Karev?" There was her voice, getting even louder, and she could feel the surge of Addisonness kicking in like a dangerous adrenaline rush. Most people knew better than to get her going. Alex Karev had apparently not learned that lesson yet. She moved off of the gurney to put her feet firmly on the floor, and there was Karev, expression still smug, arms still over his chest, daring her to do something. "Do you want me to sit here and cry about every person who comes onto my operating table who doesn't make it back out again? Do you know how many people die in this hospital every day? Do you _get_ that? And it's not about you or me. It's just not. So get over yourself. Get over this. Clean up. Move on. Because if you don't? You're never going to be a surgeon."

That came out of her mouth like a slap, and when it hit Karev's face, it clearly stung. And she hated that she did that to him, but there wasn't anyone who was going to stand in front of her and question her professional integrity. He took the smallest of steps towards her and unfolded his arms as though he might touch her, and then her pager broke the sound of silence. Karev blinked and shook his head and said, "Deal with that." It sounded like capitulation, but his mouth split into that half-smile she knew so well. It only took a second for her to glance at her pager, but that was enough for Karev to turn and go.

…

"The danger comes in caring for them, you know," Miranda said over lunch, and at first Addison didn't know if she meant the patients or her coworkers. Karev had it all wrong. She reacted. She reacted too much—she reacted with the knee-jerk reaction that was Izzie Stevens' reaction to Denny Duquette, or Karev's response to what had been their Jane Doe. "And that's why you're sitting here at my table, steam still coming out your ears. So when they mess up, you take it personally. Trust me, I know. And they mess up all the time."

Addison pushed her green beans around her plate and stared across the cafeteria to where the interns sat, like it was a private club, but it was one of the hardest private clubs to belong to. Their lives weren't their own. Everything they did was under the microscope of people who had too much education and too little social interaction. Karev hadn't so much as looked her way since she'd come into the cafeteria, and there he was—with Stevens, O'Malley, and Meredith Grey. He was sitting closer to Stevens than Addison was entirely comfortable with, but that was certainly his prerogative. He was allowed to do whatever to whomever whenever he liked. He was allowed to do that. And as far as she could tell, he was making faces out of Stevens' mashed potatoes and peas, and he was allowed to do that too. He was an attractive young man in the prime of his life. And she—well, who was she to stop him?

"He didn't mess up. Nobody messed up. It was just something that happened."

"People die all the time, yadda-yadda," Miranda said, and she looked at Addison like she wasn't convinced. Miranda then turned to look at the interns' table, and they responded in kind by straightening up to look presentable, especially Stevens, who still had the most to lose, and when she looked back at Addison it was to say, "Are you and Karev—you know."

Addison, mouth full of green beans, nearly choked. It was funny, the way everyone's mind immediately jumped to that, as though sexual tension could be the only reason an attending might be frustrated with an intern. How low they'd set the bar, Preston and Derek. In fact, the bar was destroyed. Any set rules they'd had about hospital behavior were gone. It was Sodom and Gomorrah all over again, and the most anyone could hope for was that God wouldn't strike them all dead.

"No," Addison said, setting her fork down next to her tray. "We are not. There was an incident this morning involving a surgery, but we're not. No, we are not. We're not. There's no sex here."

"I was just asking if you two were okay, but clearly there was my answer." Addison looked at Miranda, whose eyebrows were high on her forehead in a cool expression of silent disapproval, and yes, thought Addison, yes, there was her answer.

…

"I like that I can get you angry," Karev said from the doorway of the neonatal ward. She hadn't heard him approach, and she wasn't expecting him back, not this shift, maybe not the shift after. She'd once told him that she hoped Sloan didn't break him down, but maybe she just wasn't any better than Mark. She sometimes thought that was why she disliked him so much—being confronted with her mistakes and her own personality flaws on a daily basis was trying at best. And then when Karev's voice came from the doorway as Addison stopped to adjust the intubation on Baby McEnroe—as yet unnamed, the parents still too afraid they might lose him—she thought that maybe Karev was stronger than she gave him credit for. Maybe he couldn't be broken down by either one of them. "I like that fight in you," he added.

She finished the reintubation, and then she turned to look at him, her arms crossed over her chest. The anger had dissipated, her frustration with him giving way to weariness, and those were things easy to accommodate in his absence. The afternoon was spent in paperwork, and she could forget about him then too, imagine that she was better off without him, that whatever it was they were entering into was a bad idea, that Mark, really, was what she deserved. And then when he stood in front of her in his civilian's clothing, his leather jacket with the faux fur around the collar, his black undershirt, it seemed just as easy to forget that he was an intern or a bad idea or any of a hundred other things she'd told herself about him. He wasn't the bad boy. He wasn't Mark 2.0. He was just Karev.

He smiled at her crookedly, and she couldn't help smiling back. There had been no irreparable damage done. They could yell at each other and still come back for me. That was already proven to be true, at least within the realm of their jobs, and with the line between professional and personal so blurred, it seemed to hold true for them as people too. There were times when her thoughts about him were rough, awkwardly sexual—her sex life had revolved around two men for the last several years, and she felt rusty, even imagining him naked. Her mother would have blushed to think of the full-fledged fantasies she had just of how it would feel to have Karev's hands, rough from only God knew what, on the most tender expanses of skin. Hell, forget her mother. _Addison_ blushed to think of it.

And yet, for as heady as her daydreams sometimes became, she thought of other things too—and looking at him in that doorway, she wondered if he was the type of man to ever let her help shave him. She knew how intimate it was to let one person press a knife against another. To risk someone else harming you, that was a sacrifice. To give them the blade with which to do it, that was another.

And she knew too that what she felt for Karev was based in lust, infatuation. She hardly knew him, and if she was lucky, all of it would fade into the rest of things that she categorized as good ideas at the time. That would certainly be the easy thing, but Addison knew her life and the way her heart worked, and easy was not usually her way out.

"Well, I've got plenty of it," she said, and she did, lots of fight, enough to last a lifetime. It was what kept her going, that fight, what kept her strong and together and _with it_, even when she didn't feel like it.

Both of them waited, maybe on the other to say they were sorry, but she wasn't an apologizer, and she'd never known him to be one either, and she turned back to the incubator to look at Baby McEnroe. "Come see," she said to him, and she slid her hands into the sealed crib. The newborn reached for her hands, still unable to see properly out of its squinted eyes, but it seemed to know she was there. "He's so strong already, and his parents still don't want to name him."

She could feel Karev behind her, his warmth close enough for her to be cognizant of, and she thought for a second that his hand brushed over the back of her lab coat. She must have been imagining it, and she dismissed it just as easily as she experienced it. "Maybe they don't want to get too attached to something they can't keep," he said.

Ain't that the truth, Addison thought. She'd once given a child a name, a child she couldn't and wouldn't keep, and she knew the way that giving something a name or a label or even articulating it at all made it real. Her child had never once been anything but—but there was a difference between mourning her unborn, unnamed child still in its first trimester and mourning someone with a _name_.

When she looked at him, he was looking at her and she realized maybe that wasn't what he was talking about at all. If it was her he was thinking of while looking at her so intensely, she wanted to tell him that he could keep her—that she _wanted_ to be kept. But she couldn't assume. He'd been the one after all to tell her that not every man who looked at her wanted her. But still, there was something in his expression.

He looked for a moment like he might kiss her, and she panicked and looked back at the baby. The panic came bubbling out of nowhere, like an anxiety arising about an unknown problem, a worry at the pit of one's stomach about nothing at all, but she looked at Baby McEnroe with his tiny baby fingers that had once been blue from lack of oxygen, and she said, "He's so beautiful."

"He really is," Karev said, and he moved closer to her, close enough to be touching, and if she turned to look at him, they'd be so close they'd have to kiss. The idea of it terrified her, and she realized it was because it counted. Because she wanted it to count. Because she wanted it to be their second proper kiss, and she wanted to remember it four years later when they were celebrating anniversaries. And—_oh_, went her brain, that was where the panic came from. It came from making plans.

"All babies are though."

"All babies are _not_ pretty," Karev said, laughing a little. "There are some really ugly ones."

"Dr. Karev," Addison said, but she was laughing too, and she forgot for a moment how close they were, and when she turned to look at him, pulling her hands from the incubator, he hesitated only a second before leaning in to kiss her. And it was nice and warm and perfect, and everything she wanted it to be, including his hand sliding in between her dress and lab coat to pull him closer to her, but the panic was supreme. When she pulled away from him, the panic was in his eyes too, and she put her hand to his cheek to say _sorry_, I'm so sorry I passed that on to you.

"Is this not okay?" he said, and his voice was husky and betrayed him.

"God, how could it not be okay," she said, and then she cursed herself, because that was the sort of thing meant for the recesses of her brain only, places no human beings were allowed to go—but it was too late. There it was, in the open, articulated, with a _name_, and Karev leaned in to kiss her again, this time with the sloppy imprecision of an eager man. Her fingertips ran over his jaw, the edges of his five o'clock shadow, and as his kiss pressed deeper, she had to pull away—for breath, for re-gathering, for perspective.

He looked at her, confused but not hurt, and his hand stayed at the small of her back, holding her close. She got it then, not wanting to get too attached to something she couldn't keep. It wasn't that he couldn't keep her, she realized—it was that she couldn't keep him, not in good conscience. She was damaged goods, and maybe he was too; it was likely they all were, in their own ways, but what she deserved and what he deserved were beasts of two different orders.

There'd be no telling him that though, and she pulled him in to kiss him softly. When she withdrew again, it was to say, "I have to go take a nap in the on-call room or I'll never be able to stay for the whole shift."

"Let me come with you," he said, but there was laughter in his voice, as though he hardly expected her to acquiesce to him.

"God, if only you knew how much I'd—" Again, something that belonged better in her brain, and she shut her mouth to keep the rest inside. His eyes met hers, a silent laughter behind them, and she pushed him away a little and said, "Go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow will come early."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and his smile was contagious—but not diseased. No, it was the best thing Addison had seen in weeks.

…

The light of the on-call door opening woke her up before the hand brushing hair off her face did, but it was only the latter that made her open her eyes. She couldn't have been out for more than twenty minutes, and she reached for her pager, muttering, "Did I miss a page." The light from the open door vanished as it crept shut, and the voice in the darkness wasn't that of a nurse coming to get her for something urgent, as it usually was.

"I moved in with Meredith and Izzie—since George moved out," said Karev, and his hand was exquisitely warm against her skin. She was dreaming, she decided, because there was no other way around this scenario in her head. A to B to C, that was how things worked with her, and this, at best guess, was Q, and there was nothing else around it. "And they're, like, mad women. Can I just—crash here with you?"

She couldn't see him, not in the darkness, and there was too little light coming under the door for her to bother letting her eyes adjust, and she shut her eyes again. His hand moved to her shoulder and then down her lower back, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek and said, "No funny business, I promise."

"Just don't push me off the bed," she muttered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for him to crawl onto the too-thin mattress with her. Besides, it was her dream. She could do whatever the hell she wanted.

"If I do, you can hit me."

"It's a deal," she said, and she buried her head under her arm. The springs of the bottom bunk creaked under his weight as he slid in with her, and his arm found its resting place around her hip. There was something warm near her nose, but she was too tired to place it, and when he spoke, she realized it was his mouth.

"Go back to sleep," he said, and that was all she needed.

To be continued.


	3. I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I

Viscosity

Summary: In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, but let's be honest, this is pretty much my interpretation of the rest of season 3.

Rating: T.

Author's note: I hope you guys like long chapters, because this thing is flying out of my hands, and I really am just going to keep going. And thank you so much again for the warm things everyone's saying; I love writing this, and I'll keep at it, just as long as you're still reading. I hope you guys trust me too, because I've got a lot of places to go with this.

* * *

Chapter 3: I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart

She woke from a dream about Mark and a penguin feeding zoo, where Derek was the zookeeper, and the first thing she realized was it was neither morning nor was she in her own bed—'own' being laughable, as she'd been in a hotel bed for months. The third piece of vital information was that the arm around her was not one she recognized. Oh, that was a lie. She recognized it. The fourth piece of information was her pager, set to both its loudest setting and vibrate, and it stuttered in its place between the edge of the mattress and the wall.

What bothered her most was not the cramp in her back or the overwhelming heat from two bodies sharing essentially the same space, nor was it the beeping of the pager, and it wasn't the familiar arm that was cradled just underneath hers. It was the fact that she wanted to stay, forsaking doctorly duty. And what bothered her more was she felt almost guilty, as though she were betraying Mark—which seemed laughable, considering.

All that aside, the first order of business was the pager—which she stopped from rattling against the wall and stared at for a solid ten seconds before her eyes adjusted to read it, even with the backlit screen, it still beeping in its volunteering, helpful way. The second order of business was getting away from the body in the on-call bed with her.

Addison was known for her morning after post-traumatic stress disorder. Mark was probably the authority on the subject of her and AM disappearances, but Derek might have had a word or two to say as well. It was their first time, Addison's and Derek's, and come morning, she panicked. She couldn't bring herself to languish in bed and try to be sexy, mascara-eyed and morning-breathed and bed-headed. She couldn't sit there and pretend that what they'd done the night before, a lot of groaning and panting, was still sexy in the stark light of morning. No, it was the morning after blues that struck Addison more than anything—the remembrance of the stupid things said in the throes of passion and the fact that doing it in high heels probably seemed sexy at the time but just left awkward marks everywhere. Not that she was in the habit of that, but it had been known to happen once or twice.

Which brought her back to the situation at hand.

The last time she'd still had a man in bed with her in the morning, well, it was Mark, and this was not Mark's arm. And it was not Mark's leg pressed between hers. And the truth was that Mark usually got up with enough time to shave and fix his hair and look totally presentable, which spoke to his character more than it did to his bedside manner, but all that said and done, it had been a long time since she'd woken up in someone's arms. Properly.

"Could-you-turn-that-fucking-thing-off," came his whimper of a demand, and it was only then that she realized his mouth was against her shoulder. There was exactly one layer of clothing between them, and his mouth was on it, and then his arm tightened around her waist. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to go back to sleep and wake up somewhere else entirely—maybe not the on-call room, where getting away from him could only be interpreted as the latter half of the fight-or-flight response. Maybe her hotel room, but that certainly felt like Mark's territory, and she made a mental note to request a room change at the earliest possible moment. Maybe his place—and the idea of that made her laugh, she, coming down to breakfast in the morning with Derek all dewy-eyed and in love, she wearing Karev's shirt, Meredith plopping down at the breakfast table like the waif she was, and maybe, just for added sitcom relief, Izzie Stevens arriving to round out the group.

What bothered her more than how ludicrous the idea was was the fact that it seemed kind of nice. Breakfast with Karev. Wearing his shirt. Smelling like him. Morning breath. And she could even deal with Derek and Meredith in all their mooniness. It was strange to her that only in the context of Addison-and-Alex did Meredith-and-Derek cease to be awkward and start to be comical.

There was no way to be sexy and come-hither in the on-call bed. It was a metal frame with, as far as Addison had ever been able to tell, a two-inch piece of foam serving as a mattress, and if either one of them sat up too quickly, they'd be left with head trauma and probably a stitch or two. She debated the value of turning over, putting her hand on his face, maybe giving him a little kiss, telling him she'd see him later. What were they even doing? They'd just spent the night—or the last couple of hours, at any rate—together, but there'd been no mention of _dating_ or _exclusivity_, and as far as she knew, he hadn't even tried to put his hand down her shirt. She might have been offended if she weren't so oddly turned on by his gentleman's behavior.

And then her pager beeped again. She had to answer it, because if she didn't, it meant she was letting her personal interfere with her professional, and that was one thing she told herself she'd never let happen. "Fucking pager off," Karev grunted into her shoulder again.

"I have to go," she said to him, struggling to pull herself out of both his grasp and the corner of the bed she'd somehow made her way into.

"Just take the pager with you And close the door quickly." His voice was still muffled by his shoulder and slurred by his semi-unconscious state, but he didn't sound angry, and when his arms tightened around her waist, she knew that that was just how they were going to function for the time being. She was going to pretend that they weren't on the verge of something meaningful, and he was going to do the same, and they were going to continue to betray themselves through the specificity of their body language and the way they looked at each other. That, she decided, was far preferable to standing in a supply closet, being told that he just wasn't that into her.

She had to climb over him to get out of the bunk, his arms grudgingly letting her go, and when she was free of the bed, he quickly filled in the space she left. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, thanks to the light that came in underneath the door, and as she bent to slide her heels on, she looked at Karev, at the line of his back and the angle of his shoulder blades. What struck her in her odd moments of clarity was that he was such a _man_, a realization she was still struggling with. Years of habit and surgical bigotry taught her to treat interns as just interns. Hands off, don't get attached. The rules were implicit. Karev was a man, not just the boy she was teaching to be a better doctor. There would come a point, she knew, where she didn't have to remind herself of that—and where it wouldn't surprise her any more.

She almost stopped to kiss him goodbye, but there was the sense that this wouldn't be her last opportunity—it was just her first. She reattached her pager to her hip and retrieved her lab coat from underneath Karev's, hung on the support bar of the bunk, and the giddy teenager in her was overwhelmed and thrilled by how much her own coat smelled like him.

When she opened the door to the on-call room, flooding the room with light—to Karev's evident dismay, he expressing it through a grunt and the covering of his head with the ineffectual airplane-like pillow—Izzie Stevens was standing on the other side, her hand extended to open the door. Stevens' mouth became the perfect 'o' of consternated surprise, and she said, "Dr. Montgomery?"

Addison wasn't sure about the pitch of the other woman's voice. 'Woman' was giving Stevens too much credit. As far as Addison could tell, Stevens had always behaved like a girl. It wasn't something Addison could grudge her. They all had some growing up to do. "Dr. Stevens?" Addison said, echoing Stevens' intonation. A grunt came from the bed behind her, probably Karev's way of telling her to close the door, and Addison moved in front of it. It was partly to block the light, but she had to be honest with herself, part of it was to block him too.

"Is Alex—Dr. Karev—in there? He left the house last night, and I thought—" Stevens broke off, and Addison pulled the door almost entirely shut behind her, her hand still around the doorknob, press against the small of her back. There was something strange in Stevens' voice, the kind of strangled _jealous_ tone Addison knew well. She invented the strangled jealous tone, the one that fought so hard not to sound that way. The dismissively casual, 'oh, so you two are spending time together.'

And Addison, as far as she could tell, was left with two choices. She could deny, which was one of her favorite pastimes, or she could own up to it. The answer of 'no' was far guiltier than the answer of 'yes', especially because Stevens could open that door after Addison was gone, discover her lie, and assign meaning to it. And what did Addison have to hide? Mark could sleep with everyone, Derek could be with an intern, and Preston could too, for that matter—and so could Callie. God, Callie _married_ an intern and no one batted an eye. Stevens could fall in love with her own patient, shamelessly, and even Richard could have an affair. Addison was entitled to precisely what she wanted, and she wanted to tell Izzie Stevens that, yes, Alex Karev was in the on-call room. He was fully clothed, but yes, he spent the night with her. With Addison Forbes Montgomery. Yes, that had happened, she wanted to say. And who was going to stop her? Who had their moral integrity intact enough at Seattle Grace to say, How dare you. The answer was absolutely no one, save Miranda Bailey, and that was precisely the way it should have been.

"Yes. Dr. Karev is asleep," Addison said, feeling her full height for the first time in months. She was Addison Montgomery, after all.

"Oh. Thank you?" Stevens said, her tone still mildly obstinate, but more than that, she seemed confused. It hardly mattered to Addison, who barely heard it, but more than that, she barely cared.

…

It was endearing, at least for a while, that Derek wouldn't dance in public. It was one of the few things that Addison knew Derek was legitimately scared of, and she always wrote it off to a lack of rhythm and his inability to look like a fool in front of other people. And it was endearing, just like his cheating at crossword puzzles—as though she didn't see the crossword puzzle dictionary—or his necessity for buttering both sides of a pancake before he could eat it. Addison had always loved to dance, especially in public, especially with a good-looking man on her arm. 'Addison,' Derek used to say, 'I will do almost anything in the world for you. But I will not dance.'

It was dinner one night, years after they'd gotten married—and even at their wedding, Derek wouldn't dance, only sway—when she, Derek, Mark, and Mark's Girlfriend-of-the-Week went for dinner at Sounds of Brazil, Addison's favorite. Latin dancing, she loved it, and some part of her loved that Derek hated it. They sat down to dinner, the four of them, Mark with his excessively pretty girlfriend—whom he'd met while doing her plastic surgery, breast augmentation naturally, and it wasn't until well after dessert that the dance floor opened to those who felt the urge to get out there and mambo.

Maybe it was the wine, to which Addison always had an exaggerated reaction, but she reached for Derek's hand and said, "Come dance with me." It was a gamble. Sometimes he could be pushed in the wrong direction, snap at her, start a fight, and then the evening would turn sour. She had started to weigh everything she said to him by then, and their seams were beginning to show. Across the table from them, Mark kissed his girlfriend's neck, and Addison met his eyes and then looked back to Derek, who laughed.

"Oh, no. You're not getting me out there."

"Derek, come on," she said, standing up and tugging at his hand. She'd bought new shoes, brand-new candle apple red Jimmy Choos, which were the perfect complement to the little black dress she'd spent too much money on—but she was young, in the prime of her life, and she deserved to show off every once in a while.

"Dancing sounds like fun," Mark said, standing up and removing the napkin from his lap. Addison stood up too, as though the mutual rise from the table could convince their respective partners that there was nothing life-altering in making a fool out of oneself on the dance floor once or twice in a lifetime. "Come on," he said to his date, who looked up at him with disdain. That was her default expression—disdain, and earlier in the evening, she'd made the joke to Derek about wondering if that was the result of a botched plastic surgery. Don't mention that to Mark, Derek had deadpanned back, it might really upset him.

"I don't know," the girl said, "I don't like Spanish dancing."

Addison hid a snort behind her hand, and Mark looked at her and said, "Well, it's either you and me or it's nothing at all."

"You guys go ahead and go," Derek said, his voice free of jealousy or tension or anything that another man might have been found guilty of. He was unaffected by his best friend and his wife dancing together, which was something Addison would remember for some time after—his blankness, his inability to _react_.

"Well, gorgeous?" Mark said, and he offered a hand to her with the elegance of a professional dancer. Mark had always loved to dance, and in that moment, she, wine-slippery, found him attractive in ways she never had before. Maybe it was only in his difference from Derek that the attractiveness was born, but when she took his hand, it was with the nervous trill of newfound excitement. "I will never turn you down for a dance," he said to her, his voice loud enough for Derek to overhear.

…

Baby McEnroe, still nameless, which bothered Addison, because 'Baby McEnroe' was what would appear on his death certificate, whether he survived for a day after or a month or if he had died in utero, would need some level of reconstructive cosmetic surgery, which was what she told the parents, unmarried, and statistically likely they would stay that way if their child died. There were few things that tore couples apart quicker than the loss of a child; even infidelity's divorce rates could not eclipse that blow.

All she could do, however, was recommend reconstructive surgery, at least for some part of their little boy's problems. "It's best to do it now," she told Baby McEnroe's mother and father, both too young for this, too unprepared for the rigors of adulthood and parenthood, let alone the weight of the death of a child. "If you expect him to have a normal life."

It felt like medical school again, so textbook that she couldn't stand it, but even her pristine bedside manner failed her at times. She had to resort to the clichés, to the tired mannerisms and the things familiar to parents. A normal life—this was something they could understand, and to phrase it conditionally, 'if', would signify to them that this was the only step, that there would be no more required surgeries, no long nights spent waiting for that call, which they must have felt was inevitable. And the surgical consult was the best, even Addison had to grudgingly admit that. Mark Sloan was where he was for more reasons than just his looks. He was good at what he did, and he would make the same ambiguous lies that she was making. They made a good team, Addison and Mark. She had to admit that too.

The thought struck her that maybe she wasn't giving Mark enough credit—and the accompanying one was that she'd always given him too much. That was the problem with Mark.

"There should be a reconstructive surgeon here soon," Addison told the McEnroes, whose faces were frozen into the chagrin of torn parents, "and he's the best you're going to get, I promise that."

The father of the little boy nodded at Addison, and she did her best to offer a smile that was encouraging, optimistic and honest, all things that people wanted from their surgeons. The truth was that their little boy was probably going to be okay, but his legion problems were the beginning of a life filled with pain—the natural pain of child-rearing. Addison couldn't promise them that their child wouldn't ever go to prison, or that he would never rape anyone, that he would never dabble in drugs, but she could promise them that if they gave him a chance—and themselves a chance—then at least he was on the right foot.

And that was what had informed her own decision to terminate her pregnancy. _Terminate my pregnancy_, she thought, as though it were something so immaterial as canceling a check or quitting a job. But it was true—she would never have been able to provide that firm footing that a child needed. Not with Mark.

She turned to go and leave the McEnroes to their beleaguered silence, and in the doorway to their room, she nearly slammed into Meredith Grey. "Dr. Bailey told me to—well, to come here," she said, planted firmly in the doorway, "And so I'm here, and. And, well, what can I do?"

No one ever stopped to ask Addison how she felt about Meredith Grey, to whom she refused to refer as Dr. Grey, for reasons that went far beyond levels of respect and Ellis Grey and Derek. There was something about Meredith Grey that Addison found—well, she didn't know how she felt about it. She didn't know, because no one had ever asked her. And with the question never raised, she had never thought to articulate it. But what she did feel as she turned to look at Meredith, who stood in the doorway with the sheepish hesitation of a ten-year-old waiting to get smacked across the face for breaking an expensive vase, was a mixture of relief and disappointment that it wasn't Karev. She had grown so accustomed to seeing him there—he sometimes frustrated or keyed up or just plain, old-fashioned _angry—_that to see Meredith was both.

And seeing Meredith there and thinking mostly of Karev made her realize that maybe, finally, she was mostly over it. Over _him, _really. There was something to be said for always being in love with someone, and Addison suspected that that was the case with Derek, that they would always be interminably linked—God, they were married, after all, and sometimes Addison had to remind herself of that—but it was easier now. It was easier. She didn't look at Meredith and see her own loss. That was a good thing.

"Good. I want you to stay here, answer any questions that they might have," Addison said, lowering her glasses in a gesture that was almost muscle memory. "Dr. Sloan should be here soon, he's their cosmetic surgery consult, so please page me when he gets here."

Meredith nodded, and Addison couldn't help the thought that Meredith had the tendency to look impossibly hopeless, like she never knew the right place to begin. Maybe that was part of what Derek liked about her, the fact that it was so easy to take her hand, to hold her through the bad times. It was ego to think that maybe he liked that part of her so much because he hated that part of Addison so much. Crying alone in the bathroom, that was more Addison's style. But she knew almost nothing about Meredith and Derek, and she didn't need to know. Her only required information was that Meredith was her intern. And Derek was her coworker. It was like rearranging a sock drawer, her mental cleansing; she could dump everything out of her internal chest of drawers and start all over again. That part of her life, at the very least, was finally cleaned up.

And the truth about Meredith Grey was that she would be a very good doctor. Someday.

As she stopped at the nurse's station to check on her patients' charts, her mind went back to her own child—the one she didn't have, the one she knew she would have one day, the one she and Mark didn't plan on and the one she told Derek she wasn't ready to have. There was a pastel purple nursery that existed only in her imagination, one with little elephants painted on the wall, for the baby girl that existed only in her imagination, which was strange, since she had named her unborn child Andrew. She didn't know why. There was no history of Andrews in her family. And yet from the moment she knew she was pregnant, her hand shaking as she went, two minutes later, to read the pregnancy test, she referred to him as Andrew. Never Andy for short, the same way being called Addie got on her nerves, but Andrew. It was a good, strong, clean name for what would be a genius, ambitious, successful son.

"Addi—Dr. Montgomery," someone said, destroying her internal monologue, and she had to correct herself. It wasn't someone, it was _someone_, and she felt guilty for the upswing of her pulse in reaction to his presence when there was a family struggling to keep it together in Exam Room 2.

"Dr. Karev, hi," she said, and for a second she thought he might be angry about her graceless flight from the on-call room hours before, but there was no aggression in his expression. He was close enough for her to touch, but she kept the marginal distance. "I didn't think I'd see you today. Grey appears to be my intern for the time being."

"Yeah, she's got me down in the pit today, but I wanted to come see how the kid was doing." There was something brutally innocent about the way he said it, about the passion of his concern for Baby McEnroe, and she remembered him the night before, his soft praise for the tenacious newborn.

"He's good," Addison said. "Vitals are stable. He does need surgery for the cleft, and Dr. Sloan's coming up to take a look at it."

"Can I go in and see?"

She told him to go for it, and when he left her to go join the McEnroes in their exam room, he brushed his hand over her hip. It was the tiniest, most insignificant move, but it was almost possessive, and she liked that in him, that it hadn't taken much time at all for them to share the smallest of touches, like a secret or an inside joke. The guilt of it was dissipating into the anxiety of two people just trying to figure things out.

It was almost like a normal relationship, Addison thought, and then—_God_, that word. Relationship.

She turned back to the nurse's station to hand them back the chart she'd left sitting on the counter, and a man with a familiar swagger came around the corner. There was no denying that Mark was attractive, but he'd survived most of his life on his good looks. And she didn't know how many conversations she'd been privy to regarding Mark's vitality. He certainly tended to make an impression—funny to Addison, because she couldn't remember the first time they met. She could remember almost every time after, but not the first time. Maybe she'd been too wrapped up in Derek. Maybe Mark had been unremarkable.

Whatever the case was, she was feeling oddly ambivalent towards Mark, swagger and smarm and all. She had almost managed to render him harmless, just the same way he'd rearranged history to change them into a happy, loving couple. That was something they'd never been, but he could pretend if she was free to pretend that he had never affected her quite the way he had. Even if he did dance.

"You needed a plastic consult?" he asked her, coming up next to her at the desk and leaning down close enough to be claustrophobia-inducing. And even that had little-to-no effect on her, which meant she was either getting stronger or he was getting weaker, but she liked this. Even at her most abrasive, even in the moments when she could tell him to sit and spin, he still had sway. No more.

"I did. Baby McEnroe, cleft lip and cleft palate. I've already called in a Craniofacial Team, but I wanted you to talk to the family first. They're very concerned."

"Baby McEnroe?" Mark said, raising his eyebrows.

"They're not sure," Addison said. She and Mark had both been around enough to know what it meant, a parent still not naming their child, even so many weeks after the birth.

"They're unmarried?"

"Unmarried."

He grabbed Baby McEnroe's chart from the nurse and scanned it quickly before looking back to Addison. His expression seemed almost meaningful, and she wanted to tell him that she had named their child, that she planned on keeping him or her, that it was only in the marination of her thoughts that she realized that she just couldn't. And it wasn't because she didn't love the unborn person growing inside of her—it was that she couldn't promise it a normal life. And wasn't that what she promised other people? Normalcy?

"Wow, this is the least of this kid's problems," Mark said as he looked down at the chart again. You have no idea, Addison thought, pursing her lips and waiting for his next move. "No wonder they're scared," he added, and then he looked at her again. He tucked the chart under his arm and went into the exam room, and she watched him go. It was easy to remember the quiet, nice times with him, especially when he was kind and professional, but it was the rough and dirty Mark Sloan she liked the best, the one who pursued her relentlessly when she gave him an inch, the one who liked sex at all times, the one who told her she was beautiful mid-thrust. That was the Mark Sloan she used to like, at any rate, the one who made Derek seem boring. The more she thought about it, the more childish it became, and it almost made her laugh, the person she was back then.

She followed Mark into the exam room, where he sat, in the strange intimate way he had, on the bed with Baby McEnroe's mother. Karev stood on the other side of the room by the windows, his arms crossed over his chest, and Meredith Grey was to his side, both of them silent. Addison took her place by the door, watching Mark as he examined the baby and then looked at the mother and said, "I have to be honest with you, and I know honesty isn't something you're used to hearing, but it's good not to keep your expectations high. I can fix the cleft, that's not a problem, but judging from your son's file, he's going to need at least—"

"Dr. Sloan," Addison said. It was quick and incisive, her interruption, something that came out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying, and all three of the doctors in the room and both parents looked at her sharply. "Dr. Sloan, do you really think that's—"

"Do you want me to lie to them, Addison? I think we owe it to—"

"I think you need to come out in the hallway with me. Mr. and Mrs. McEnroe, if you'll excuse us."

Mark looked for a moment unmovable, and Addison went to him and grabbed him by the elbow and pulled with enough force that she wouldn't have been surprised if it hurt. She was angry, angry in a way she hadn't been for some time—to take away parents' hope, to tell them that their child probably would not survive, no matter what the odds were, it was the most crushing thing anyone could do, and Mark was cavalier about it, tossing the words out as though he were their primary care physician. As though she'd been _remiss_ in telling them. As though she'd missed it.

And Mark laughed at her, laughed at her anger and her ferocity, and she angrily shut the door to the exam room behind them. They were in the hall, for all the world to see, and she didn't care. "You stepped over the line, Mark."

"Hey now," he said, and she couldn't get over how fatuous he sounded, how lazy and smarmy, and he put up his hands in mock-defeat. "Don't get so angry with me just because you called me in for a consult, and I told them the truth."

"'It's not good to keep your expectations high'? You imagine for a second that you're in their shoes, agonizing day and night about your child, and a doctor, a _plastic surgeon_ comes in and tells you that your child probably isn't going to—"

"Addison, I'd love to play your passive aggressive game here, but I can't relate. You remember why? You didn't give me the choice to be a father."

It came like a punch in the stomach, and he was right, God, was he right, but he wasn't going to win this fight. "Well," she said, "I don't know that there's anything else to say here."

"There's a lot else to say."

They were beginning to attract a crowd, just as they always did, the Addison-and-Mark show, the fights in public places, the making up in public places. Once they'd even been kicked out of an expensive Italian restaurant because their argument was drawing too much attention, but this was far beyond the realm of petty arguments over whether or not she was going to file for divorce or if he was really seeing that stupid pediatric nurse behind her back. This was primal. This was personal.

"This is not about you and me, Mark. This is about someone else's child."

She was beginning to freeze up, her last, best defense mechanism to simply walk away. Derek accused her once of being an ice queen, and maybe that was true, but if she froze everyone out, then no one was ever going to get in.

"It has always been about you and me," he said. It was just like that, almost a throwaway, and Addison heard the door open next to her, and maybe it was the parents, maybe it was Karev or Meredith Grey, but it didn't matter. If they wanted to see Addison at her most beaten down, at her breaking point, well, here she was in all her glory.

"It's just _not_, Mark. And it hasn't been for almost eleven months now. So you walk back in there and you tell them that you can fix their child's cleft. And then you tell them to name their baby and _fight, _because they may not get another chance. And then you do your job. That's it."

He watched her with a flatness that she found even more infuriating than his speaking, but she was spent, the tightness in her stomach too much for her to stand there and keep fighting him, and when the cold hands found her arms and started to lead her away, she didn't fight.

…

Callie sat on the floor on the other side of the bathroom, her blue-clad legs spread out on the floor, her ankles crossed, her hands pressed to the cold tile on either side of her hips, and she watched Addison, who watched her back. Addison was not the type of woman to have many female friends, but Callie, who could grab her and walk her out of an argument with Mark, was invaluable. The toilet seat was cold, even through the material of Addison's pants, but it was the best seat in the house, and once her near-nervous breakdown was over, she had started to laugh—about Mark, about Derek, about Karev, about being chief and her tentative plans to find another hospital to transfer to—and Callie sat there, that benign, understanding expression on her face.

"I can't believe you didn't invite me to your wedding," Addison finally said, long after the laughter had stopped and her chest had ceased to feel so tight and so suffocating.

"You were my maid of honor in spirit. If it makes you feel better, we totally had Priscilla Presley as the maid of honor. And, as far as I can tell, Colonel Tom Parker was George's best man."

"You could have done worse."

"Much worse."

The silence fell again, and Addison looked at Callie with newfound respect, the kind forged only in absolute understanding. "I loved him, you know."

"I know you did. And I am so, so sorry."

Addison almost choked on her own snort, and she said, "I know, right? And here I am, sitting in a bathroom stall, hiding from him. And Alex Karev and I—he and I slept, no, we slept in the same bed together last night. And every time I see him, I just want to, I don't know, cook for him."

"No, hello, I understand," Callie said. "I married one of them, remember?"

"Do you ever regret it?"

"I only regret his friends."

"I regret Mark. I honestly do."

And there was that word again, regret, potent and strong in the air. It felt good to say, as though she were finally unburdening herself of it, and she started to open her mouth again, but there came a knock at the door. Callie had gone to the trouble of sliding the trash can in front of it to keep away curious staff and lost patients and family members, and she was the first one to get up and ask who it was. The voice came muffled through the door, and Addison stared down at her shoes, pitch black against the baby blue tiled floor. What was she doing, stuck in this bathroom, hiding from Mark? When had she become the person to bark and run?

"Hey, Addison," came Callie's voice. She and the door were blocked by the stall wall, and Addison was hardly going to get up to inspect. "There's a cute intern who wants to see you."

_Oh_. She tried to think back to her confrontation with Mark, if it had been Karev to come out that door and see the whole thing happen. If so, he'd know by now about the pregnancy, about the abortion—the entire hospital would, thanks to Addison's big mouth. But she was surprised by his ability to show up.

"Uh—send him in?" Addison said, and she heard the scraping of the trashcan against the floor as it moved to make way for the door.

And sure enough, there was Karev, still in his intern's scrubs, holding an icepack to his eye. He was the best thing Addison had seen in a very long time, and he pushed open the stall door, which had fallen closed a little, and with his other hand he kept the icepack in place.

"What happened to you?"

He laughed a little and shrugged, and then he closed the bathroom door behind him and locked it. "You do know this is a lot smaller than a supply closet, right?"

"Yeah, do you think I care?" He turned back to her and with his back pressed to the stall door he slid down to the floor. His legs bent, he put his feet on either side of hers, and when he shifted the icepack, Addison could see the swelling of his eye. "Now talk to me. Everything, just tell me all of it."

She looked at him and blinked. He was more honest than she'd ever seen anyone ever be, and when she told him that there was a lot to tell, he looked at her and he said, "And they'll page me when they need me."

To be continued.


	4. Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken

**Viscosity**

_Summary:_ In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. A continuation of my one-shot 'Simple'. Addison/Alex, but let's be honest, this is pretty much my interpretation of the rest of season 3.

_Rating:_ Eh, maybe a little T+.

_Author's note:_ Slowly but surely. This chapter's a little bit of an interlude. And trust me, we're far from done with Mark.

* * *

Chapter 4: Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken

"I had an abortion," she said, leaning back against the porcelain tank, which seemed so stark and foreign for her to say. Her admissions had always been easily numbered—Mark, first, and Mark only by default, because how else was she supposed to explain away her pregnancy? And then Callie, and she remembered that moment, the rush of air in her lungs, the casual and yet measured gait of her speech. One, two, three, and she told Callie. She didn't even have to summon the courage with Karev, who sat in front of her with a kind of fearless unambiguity that she longed for.

He could judge her. She was beyond caring about that, about the eyebrow raises and the judgment calls from people who were all pretty they would have done the same thing if they were in her position, but they hadn't been in her position, and they didn't know, and he could raise his eyebrows and judge her if he wanted. Mark had done enough of that for one lifetime, the tantrum-throwing and the violent outbursts that had only ever succeeded in proving her point. "He wanted it, and I didn't. It was my choice to make, so I made it."

Karev watched her, and his fingers drummed absently on the tip of her shoe. She liked the vibrant reminder that he was there, jammed into the too-small bathroom stall in the women's restroom, and that he wasn't going anywhere.

She waited for him to have something to say, anything, even harsh words or a 'what kind of woman aborts her unborn child', and when neither of them said anything more, Karev moved the icepack from his eye, scrunched the side of his face—the bruising and swelling even worse, in spite of the ice—and then he said, "Is that it? That's why that guy pisses you off so much?" He grimaced and slid the ice pack back to his eye and said, "I don't blame you. I wouldn't have that dude's baby either."

Addison laughed in spite of herself and the subject manner, and she nudged Karev's leg with the tip of her shoe. "And you know," he continued, grabbing her ankle with his free hand, "I'd tell you your taste in men was pretty shitty if it weren't for me."

"Oh, is that so?"

"Well, come on. Shepherd's not bad, but Sloan's a jackass."

She had to agree, and in a way that summed up her life to that point. Shepherd wasn't bad, Sloan was a jackass, and Karev was her best demonstration of good taste to date. Which was strange, because he was young, brash, impulsive—evidenced by the icepack against his eye, about which she could only make assumptions—and she knew next to nothing about him. What she did know wasn't through frank discussion; it was observation, the silence of watching him check a newborn's heartbeat, or the simplicity of his caring for a patient whose name he didn't know, whose face he couldn't see, and whose child would never be born. And she knew what could make him angry, but she didn't know why or what had happened to him in his life to create that in him, and suddenly she wanted to know. She wanted to know all of it, because she liked who he was, and she wanted to know what made him this oddly contradictory guy.

"What about you?" she said, watching him shift his wait backwards, to the door behind him.

"What about me?" He pulled back the icepack again with a sense of resignation, maybe realizing that there wasn't much to be done for it, and he shifted his head to the side so Addison could have a better look at it. "What do you think? How does it look?"

"I think it looks like someone gave you a black eye," she said, and when she moved forward on the closed toilet lid to reach out and touch it, he winced. "Sorry, I didn't mean to—you really should get that looked at." It was unnecessary for her fingers to run from the bruising down the side of his face to his jaw, unnecessary for her to bring her fingertips from the ascending ramus to his mental protuberance, and it was odd to her how her brain still qualified things like a textbook, like a copy of _Gray's Anatomy_, and it would be alright, she told her brain, to say, This is his face, this is his jaw, this is his chin.

He met her eyes, and she realized that his warm hand was still around her ankle. She suddenly didn't know what to do with her hand, still at his chin, but she knew what she wanted to do, which was slide her fingers to the back of his neck and pull him to her to kiss him. His hand pulled at her leg, and he moved forward the tiniest bit; what had once been a fairly innocent position was suddenly intensely arousing, and it was Addison's instinct to run. There was no running from this though, no getting around Karev, no escaping him, and she found she didn't want to.

"Did Mark do this to you?" she asked, turning his head to the side a little again, and his hand moved from her ankle to her calf, under the hem of her scrubs, his fingertips rough, but the patterns they traced were deftly surgical, precise, unconscious.

Karev laughed a little and said, "Only after I did it to him. Twice."

"Why?"

"He's a bully."

"Did he say something?" There was a flair of protectiveness inside Addison's chest—she had no doubt that Karev could handle himself against Mark, who was mostly flimsy and all talk, but that didn't mean she couldn't be worried for him or that she was okay with him throwing himself in the line of fire, whether it was for her or not. It looked bad in the harsh light of the bathroom, and it would look worse come morning, when the ruptured capillaries had time to spread through the space under his skin.

Karev shook his head at the question and pulled away from her a little, breaking the eye contact, breaking the physical contact with her hand too, and she said, "What is it?"

"I used to wrestle," he said, and it was almost absently. "You know, in college and high school. My dad was a bully. Worse than Sloan, but a bully." He looked down to where his hand rested around her calf, his thumb brushing over the bulge of her fibula, and she put her hand to the side of his face again, ran her fingers through his short hair, ran her thumb along his cheekbone—just to remind him that she was there, that she was going nowhere. "I started wrestling to help my mom, you know? Sometimes it was really bad. He was really bad. Heroin, all kinds of other shit, and one day I finally put him into the hospital. And that was just, you know, that."

She didn't know what to say. In the span of twenty minutes, they'd managed to reveal to each other the most painful of their secrets, and when he looked back at her to say, "It really pisses me off sometimes, the way he treats you," she had the sudden, rushing realization that Alex Karev might not be so hard to fall in love with.

There was a joke she thought to make, a whisper of 'Yeah, me too', but she couldn't make that joke, not with her feeling the way she felt and not with him looking at her like that, like he _saw_ her, like he'd always seen her. Like he'd take care of her. Like he'd never forget her birthday or their anniversary. It was so easy to be so far ahead of herself when he looked at her like that, and she didn't know who moved towards the other first, her hand pulling at the back of his head, his hand moving from her calf to the ticklish spot just above her knee, but when they kissed, Addison marked it down in her internal scrapbook as the third proper kiss.

It didn't seem to matter suddenly that she was older than he was or that her baggage was often too heavy for her to carry, that she was divorced and damaged and just trying to figure things out. At first his kiss was delicate, and then its rhythm changed, enough to disarm Addison. Karev shifted, and she realized he was moving onto his knees, and when he had to break the kiss to readjust his position, suddenly between her legs and almost at her height, she let out an involuntary whimper. He laughed at her—and rightfully so, her brain said—and then his hand was in her hair and his mouth on hers again. God, it had been too long since the last time she kissed someone who legitimately made her excited, and he knew exactly what he was doing, pressed between her legs, and she wanted to reach her hands around to his back and pull his scrub top up over his head, but they were in the hospital restroom of all places, and she couldn't—

Her train of thought was gone completely as his mouth moved to the tender spot just under her ear, and one hand was still on the back of her head, but the other dropped to her thigh. When she whimpered again, her own lack of control dismaying to her, he laughed against the skin of her neck and said, "I like that noise."

She put her hand to his neck and pulled back to look at him, and she said, "Shut up, Karev."

He laughed the kind of heady, deep laugh that made her want to do things to him that she hadn't done since her chandelier-swinging medical school days, and he said, "Yes, ma'am," and then there was his mouth again, and his tongue touched hers with a shock that quickly faded as she reciprocated. This was what it felt like to be out of practice, years of sex with no one but Mark and Derek, and they were fine and good, but Alex Karev made her feel, for the first time in a very long time, beautiful and wanted and alive. She wanted to be closer to him, inside his scrubs—inside his _skin_—and she moved her hand to his face to pull him even closer to her.

"Fuck," he said, and it wasn't a sexy half-grunt of a 'fuck'; it was her hand hitting the bruised side of his face that did it, and the moment was ruined. "Now," he said with a laugh, holding the side of his face, "now I probably need to get someone to look at it."

"I happen to know a very good plastic surgeon."

"Oh, shut up," he said, and his tone was teasing, intimate, _personal_, and she tried to think of the best way to ask him what the hell they were doing, he between her legs, she a little hot and bothered, the taste of him still very on her mouth. She tried to figure out a way to ask him out, to do it properly, how to say, Hey, you and me—and before she could even find those words, the door opened.

"Hey, guys, if you're getting biblical, I don't want to intrude, but the chief's looking for you, for both of you—and he looks pissed," came Callie's voice, and it seemed less like an interruption than a pause, a comma in what Addison knew would continue later.

And Karev looked at her and kissed her softly on the mouth before standing up and adjusting his pants, she noted with amusement and pride. She still had it in her to get the men worked up. He grunted, half-swallowing the sound, and as he looked down at where she sat, still on the toilet seat, he said, "I wonder if I have time for a cold shower."

…

Twice she found other women's panties in the belongings of the man she loved. The second time, they were Meredith's panties, black, ridiculous, and tiny—but it was the first time that was gutting. The first time, they were pink, tiny, and ridiculous, and they were in Mark's things. She sat on her bed, _her_ bed, because she had to address everything in the singular, because what had once been _their_ bed, hers and Derek's, was now just _hers_, and it would never be hers and Mark's, no matter how much time they spent there, and she sat on the bed holding the pink pair of panties, not Victoria's Secret but some knock-off with an embroidered pair of lips on the hip. They weren't just ridiculous, they were trashy, and it was the first time her brain used that word to describe Mark. Trashy. Ridiculous.

She couldn't cry. She wanted to, God, did she want to. She wanted to cry and scream, and she wanted to run to Mark and tell him she couldn't believe she gambled everything on him. She wanted to be vengeful and spiteful and a hundred other –fuls, and then she wanted to come back to _her_ place and listen to Nancy Sinatra, and she wanted to put on her favorite pair of heels and then get blitzed and laid and go back to the beginning and start over again with something fresh and new and good.

There was just one small problem with that, she realized, sitting on her bed, holding a pair of pink panties, wearing just a towel. The problem was she loved him. She loved him with everything that was left over from Derek, and that might not have been a lot, but it was everything she had left. And there was nothing after that. That was all there was to Addison Montgomery-Shepherd. There was Derek, and then there was Mark, and she couldn't bring herself to cry.

And maybe it was what she deserved, she realized—to be cheated on. That was what she deserved, because she had done it to a man who loved her. She had taken everything good and pure about Derek and wasted it on a man who was good in bed and took his time to tell her she was beautiful when her own husband couldn't say hi when they crossed paths, eternal ships in the night. She had _done_ that, and when he finally left, even though it was only a handful of days after the incident—incident, she liked to call it, because it came from the Latin for _to befall_, and that implied that maybe she wasn't the only guilty party—she called Mark. And Mark sat across from her and pledged his allegiance to the flag of Addison, and she said, Alright, let's do this.

But then there was the issue of the pink panties in her hand. She got dressed in silence, ate breakfast in silence, and she replayed the moment of discovery over and over again. He had left for an early surgery, and she went to his drawer—and she'd done it a hundred times, which meant the panties were new, and this was recent, this betrayal—to grab a t-shirt of his, and there they were. A badge of honor. Mark's inability to keep it in his pants. You could take the man-whore off of the market, but you apparently could not keep the market off of the man-whore.

She slammed cabinets with the calm security of a woman scorned. For the first time in weeks, she had moral superiority. Derek, on the other side of the country, could still judge her, but Mark was a different story. Mark would see Addison Montgomery at her best—or her worst, depending on the point of view. Moral indignation suited her, she decided, pouring herself a cup of coffee. For a solid hour, she steamed, and for a solid hour, she watched the pink panties in the center of her dining room table, as though they might stand up and announce their ownership.

They didn't need to. She knew precisely whose they were.

When she got to her office, she brought the pair of panties with her. She vaguely considered stopping to behave like an adult, ending things with Mark, calling it a very long, bad day, but she was not a woman to let things go lightly. Other women could suffer in silence. Addison liked to suffer out loud and in front of other people.

Her receptionist, _Suzie_, was already at work, which was just as Addison planned it. _Suzie_, that was a ridiculous name, just like her ridiculous panties, and _Suzie_ looked up at her from the desk in the waiting room. The only thing that could have stopped Addison's impending outburst would be patients waiting for her, because the one thing more important than her pride was her practice, but it was too early for anyone to be in, too early for pregnant women holding their stomachs with the pain of morning sickness. Suzie, Suzie, Suzie, Addison thought as she stopped at the desk to pick up her messages, scrawled with Suzie's name, little heart over the I, and she languidly read through them. Had it been last night, when Addison was delivering the newborn Thompson baby? Was Suzie looking at her, thinking about how she'd slept with the man Addison loved?

Suzie had had sex with Addison's Mark. That was what he was. He was _her_ Mark. He was her Mark and she was going to stab him with a stiletto, preferably one belonging to what she could only imagine to be many girlfriends, but Suzie, well, Suzie was going to suffer Addison's wrath in a different way.

"How are you today, Suzie?" Addison asked her, still idly scanning through her messages.

"I'm good, Dr. Montgomery-Shepherd, how are you?"

I'm homicidal, she almost said. I'm going to gut you and hang you up to be eaten by the birds, she almost said. She looked at Suzie, and she thought of when she went to surprise Mark at work and he was giving Suzie a _consult_, she in her underwear—those absurd panties—receiving a … consult. Consult, breast job, it just didn't matter. Her panties were in Mark's drawer, and Addison was going to hit someone.

Instead what she did was reach into her coat pocket and pull out the balled-up panties and set them on the counter. With just her fingertips, she took one hip and then the other, and she spread them out and held them up. "These, I believe, belong to you, Suzie."

Addison always liked anger because of how clean it burned. Once she got angry enough, everything else disappeared in the white-hot flare of it. Anger made her feel better. But Suzie clearly didn't feel better because of Addison's fury. Her face turned white and then promptly shifted to bright pink, and she opened her mouth to try to stutter an explanation, and Addison said, "Sweetheart, save it."

It wasn't much, but it was enough for Addison. Nobody was going to play her for a fool, and nobody was going to pull one over on her. Suzie still had no response, and Addison set her panties on the counter, gathered her messages, and headed back to her office.

…

Addison was the first to step into the elevator after the meeting with the chief, where she'd been called to defend a sexual relationship she wasn't having—yet, at any rate—and there was a soothing familiarity to the paneling inside the elevator, to the fact that it would always be there, always be necessary. It would always run up and down, and that, at the very least, would never change. Richard was right, of course, that there could be no yelling matches, attending vs. attending, there could be no physical fights, intern vs. attending, and just because everything was a little strange around Seattle Grace as of late it didn't mean that everyone could start acting like there were no rules. Addison knew that. Addison had been on the receiving end of that particular lecture more than once, and it was suddenly funny to her, the way it was probable that some of them would simply never grow up. Mark, for one, but maybe she could lump herself into that category too. The hospital was too self-contained, too much an entire subculture all on its own. People lived, slept, ate, worked, and played at Seattle Grace, the same way it was at every hospital, and there would be slips from time to time, bad judgment calls, punches thrown, mistakes made, and every once in a while, people would fall in love. And they would get heartbroken, hurt, destroyed, damaged. Most of the time they got up and went to work the next morning in spite of it. Addison had always gone to work the next morning, even if it had been to ask for the day off to do some drinking. Even if she got up early to dye her hair blonde. She still went in.

The next person to get into the elevator was Mark, who wouldn't look at her, his bottom lip still extended to show the depth of his sorrow about his wounded face. Karev could take it like a man, but Mark took it like a plastic surgeon, surveying the damage, wondering how much less or more sex would be coming his way because of it. He looked at her, and then he turned around. His shoulders were tense, and she could almost feel his clenched jaw from a couple of feet away. He might have been legitimately angry with her, she realized, and maybe he had reason to be. She and Karev were doing poor jobs of concealing their mutual attraction, and she was the one who said that she didn't want to give up all of the history between her and Mark. It was her deal, and she was breaking it. "You know, Addison," Mark said as the elevator started to close, and then there was a hand between the elevator doors, pushing them back open.

It was Karev, and he looked at Mark and then grinned at Addison shamelessly, and she thought back to the moment in Richard's office when Richard looked at the three of them and said, 'Are you two having a sexual relationship?' We're not, no, we're not, Addison and Karev had said, overlapping each other, making themselves look guilty as hell, and the memory of barely being able to keep from laughing then made her laugh in the confinement of the elevator. Karev came to stand next to her, and she braced herself with one hand on the railing behind her. At first she made an honest attempt to stop the laughter, but it had been a long day, and she had to turn around to face the wall, both hands on the railing. Karev leaned against the wall, and the elevator doors slid shut behind her.

It was funny—and she couldn't help that—that a year ago she was in love with two men, fighting for one of them and avoiding the other. It was funny that she gave up a successful practice in New York to come to Seattle, a place she hated, to pursue a man who wanted nothing to do with her, and it was _funny_ about Meredith Grey. It was funny too about the various women Mark had slept with, and it was funny that Addison kept going back for more, in spite of her much better judgment. It was all just so funny, the thousands of things that had lead up to her standing in an elevator with an intern she wanted to get naked and an attending she'd seen naked, and when Karev looked over at her, it made her laugh even harder. He started to laugh too, and she wondered what Mark was thinking, whether he thought they were laughing at him or if he was too preoccupied with his damaged face to care, and when the elevator stopped on some floor, any floor, Karev wrapped his arm around her waist, turned her around, and lead her out and around Mark, who said and did nothing.

He was still laughing when he told Mark, "We're getting off here," and when the elevator doors slid closed on Mark's unamused expression, Karev tightened his grip around Addison's waist and said, "We're going to be in so much trouble."

…

When Addison arrived at Exam Room 2 to pay her promised apology to the McEnroes, it was Mrs. McEnroe who looked at Addison first and said, "We've chosen a name."

Baby McEnroe was back in the incubator to ensure his temperature stability and his breathing, and Addison wanted to say that she understood how hard this had all been for them, but it would have been a lie. She understood intellectually, and she understood on paper. She understood what she had observed in other people, but she didn't know the gut-rot of losing a child that you didn't choose to lose or the fear of the prospect of it. She did understand in a way how hard it must have been for them to find a way to hope.

Karev was behind her, but he moved around her to go into the room. Addison watched him, and she thought she could see the seams of his adulthood, the creases of his growth, the pull of his mental skin where his strength had outgrown his body. She didn't know how many cases he had taken responsibility for over the last couple of months, but she did know that, whatever happened between him and her, she had to encourage him towards this and away from plastics. It had nothing to do with Mark and everything to do with the lives he could save.

Baby McEnroe's mother, to whom Addison still referred as Mrs. McEnroe, even though the family was unmarried—because to be a parent was to be joined, inseparable in this thing even if in nothing else, was a small woman, too tiny to have given birth to a child. Baby McEnroe was tiny too, but he was a survivor, and as Addison leaned against the door, she realized that maybe Baby McEnroe's mother was a survivor too. Baby McEnroe's father sat on the bed next to her, his hand touching her knee through the fabric of her sheets, and Baby McEnroe's mother looked at Addison and said, "We thought about it—when we heard you and the other doctor fighting. And you're right, we have to give our baby a chance, and we have to fight for him."

"And Dr. Karev said," Baby McEnroe's father said, looking over his shoulder to Karev, who stood in his familiar place by the windows, "that we'd always regret not fighting for something we loved."

It was always jarring, the change in perspective. She should have expected that Karev would continue to surprise her, but no matter how prepared she thought she was for it, he found new ways to silently tell her that she hadn't seen anything yet.

"And that's why," Baby McEnroe's mother said, looking to her husband for last-minute approval, "we've decided to name him Alex."

Karev coughed and said, "What?" as though for a moment he couldn't remember his own name, or that he had no idea that his bearing upon another person's life could be so meaningful as to bestow his name on another human being. He looked at the McEnroes and then at Addison, who felt strangely proud of him, of the things he'd accomplished by just being a good doctor. "Wow, I—" he said, and then he shook his head.

This, she realized, was the moment of his maturing as a doctor. More than losing a patient or making a mistake was this, the pivotal, defining moment, the realization of one's effect, the cognizance of his own power. This was something Karev would remember for the rest of his life, and there would be days later on when he would stop and remind himself that there was a child out there with his name, and it was because of something he said or did, a touch he gave, the honesty in his voice, the precision in his heart. This would be what he would carry with him forever, even if he remembered nothing else about this day, not Addison, not punching Mark Sloan, he would remember this.

"I think it's an excellent name," Addison said, filling the space, and the McEnroes smiled at her.

Karev's attention was elsewhere, and he pulled his pager off of the waistband of his scrubs, and he said, "9-1-1 call." And then, to cover for the lack of sound, he said, "I turned it on to silent. Because we were in the chief's office." It was a lie; Karev knew just as well as Addison did the specific rules about the pagers, number one being never to turn them to silent, no matter the situation, but he excused himself from the room, and Addison watched him go.

…

He stood next to Baby McEnroe's incubator—no, _Alex_ McEnroe's incubator, Addison corrected herself—and Addison watched him from the doorway. He had yet to notice her, and she watched his careful precision in the hearing of the child's heart, the taking of his temperature, the monitoring of the vital signs. She'd been there for five minutes with no cognizance on his part, and when she finally said, "You deserve that, you know," he started, surprised, and looked up at her.

_Oh_, thought Addison; his eyes were red from the tears he had yet to cry, and this was the desperate, scared side of Alex Karev she had yet to see, the side that felt so vibrantly as to move her. She went to him, and he did not withdraw his hands from the incubator, and he still said nothing. It was not bravado. It was not ego. It was not anything but the beautiful simplicity of his love. Maybe he wasn't the kind of guy to cry at Hallmark commercials, but by God, he could be moved. He could be affected. "It's an excellent name," Addison said again, watching his face, and when he pulled his hand out of the incubator to stubbornly wipe away a tear, she knew he'd been right back at the elevator—they were going to be in so much trouble.

To be continued.


	5. You're Pretty Good Looking For a Girl

**Viscosity**

_Summary: _Alex's version.

_Rating:_ Well, Alex's thoughts are a little more colorful than Addison's, but it's still a T, unless you consider gratuitous use of the f-bomb worthy of a higher rating.

_Author's Note:_ This chapter is such a weird gamble, because I wanted to make sure I was doing Alex justice, so I decided to write out a lot of the main events of the story so far from Alex's POV. This is definitely my first time finding his voice, so if you hate it, at least be nice about it, and don't worry, it'll probably be all Addison's POV from here on out. It's also a very long chapter, at 7300 words. Nothing really new happens, it's just the other side of the rock. I'm also taking liberties with Alex, because there's so much that we don't know. So bear with me, and I hope you enjoy this chapter.

Also, I really wanted to say thank you to everyone for responding so warmly to this story. This is my first venture into the GA fandom, at least as far as writing fiction, and everyone's just been so lovely that it makes it so easy to keep writing and to keep writing quickly. Also, I apologize that the last chapter was riddled with typos-- I almost never proofread, shame on me.

* * *

Chapter 5: You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)

Izzie Stevens had started to get on his nerves. It wasn't a bad kind of nerves, although he could feel that coming later down the line, but her personality had started to get borderline obsessive, and there were few things that bothered Alex Karev more than whiny women. Meredith Grey was the same story, and if asked five years ago if he was going to be the Jack Tripper to someone else's Janet and Chrissy, he'd have said hell no. He didn't know how O'Malley did it, but it was driving him insane—and not in a funny sitcom kind of way.

Alex had a system. He wasn't big into order. Or cleanliness. Or having systems for things, but it was something fomented in his bachelor years and really important now that he was a guy with a career and a life ahead of him. His system went like this: Alarm goes off, hit snooze for five minutes. Once the alarm went off again, that was when he would get up. Go straight to the shower, otherwise do not pass go, do not collect $200. The shower solved his first problem of the day—waking up. After approximately two minutes in the cold water, he would switch over to the hot water, wash his hair, do the soap thing, and after maybe about ten minutes of that, he'd get out. Breakfast was usually unnecessary, especially with how many food stations Seattle Grace had around, and even when he was still in medical school, it was pretty much a pop-tart and a Dr. Pepper and then he was out the door.

And he had always liked that. There was nothing _wrong_ with that, as far as he was concerned. And then, after not eating breakfast, he'd do a hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups, because that was habitual, and then he was out the door. The whole process took thirty minutes, tops. If he kept to that, he could get up at 4:30 instead of 4—or 3:15, as Grey and Izzie apparently did on a daily basis, which Alex figured was the ultimate, definitive proof that they were out of their minds.

His evening system wasn't much different from his morning system. The shifts were usually one of a couple of things—an on-off shift, meaning they'd work thirty hours on, thirty hours off, an on-call shift, meaning the pager on their waistbands became like a time bomb, a grenade, or one of those electronic monitors that the cops put on people on house arrest, and what Alex silently referred to as the shit shift, which meant it didn't matter what you were scheduled. You were there, you did, you mopped up, and then you took the shit for it. The shit shift. It also didn't matter which shift he'd worked. When he came home—laughably, because it was Grey's home, and it was kind of Izzie's home, and it was O'Malley's home, but Alex had never been one to call much of anything his home—he liked to grab a beer, take a piss, watch some TV, and then call it a night. On a good night, he could squeeze getting lucky in there too, but if he was being honest with himself, he'd have to say that being an intern had effectively killed his sex life.

The exceptions were notable, but he was getting over them. Izzie was one such exception, but when he came home from a long day—every day was a long day, but losing a patient made any day unbearable, and he usually lubed them up with alcohol to get through whatever there was of it that was left—and Izzie was making more cupcakes than anyone on the planet could deal with, all he was really thinking about was Addison Montgomery. Dr. Montgomery. Addie. Whatever. God, he was fucked. Not that he hadn't realized that weeks ago when they'd been standing in front of the incubator—he couldn't remember what she'd been saying, although it was probably important or condescending, knowing Addison, but he remembered looking at her mouth and thinking that there were probably few things better than kissing her. And he almost had, except the nurse came in—and then in the bar, Addison had just done it, because she had more balls than most men he knew, and he wanted to keep on doing it. Then she started playing those stupid women games with him that he should have known how to interpret but he didn't, and he had to cover his ass before she cut his nuts off by telling him that she just wasn't that into him.

Alex had never maintained that he knew how to handle women. He just knew how to get them into bed, and after that, he was all thumbs and bad manners and never returning phone calls. Which he'd always been fine with.

He tossed his keys down on the table just inside Grey's door, announcing his presence, and he was still thinking about Addison, which almost ruined his day. It would have been so much better if he hadn't been all talk when he told her that he wasn't that into her, and then she had to go and do something stupid by looking at him in that way she had, by speaking up and almost apologizing for being a little bit of a bitch after she'd almost stuck her tongue in his mouth. It would have been okay too if he hadn't been so compelled to tell her he was a little bit of an asshole too, and it would have been a lot better if he'd agreed to go up to her place and take her to bed. And it would have been so much easier if he could have just done that and gotten up in the morning and left and felt like he achieved something and then never mention it again. That was his modus operandi, and it pissed him off that when she was delivering herself up on a silver platter, he had to go and ruin it by being a gentleman. Where the hell had that come from?

"Alex? Is that you?" the voice from the kitchen came, and he realized a little ex post facto that the way to go would have been to sneak in, go upstairs, pop open his private stash of alcohol, and call it a night. What were Izzie and Grey doing that they were home that much earlier than he was? He wished, inanely, that Addison had accepted his offer to come over, which was dumb, because he hated actually sleeping over, but there was something about Addison that just seemed natural—and like she wasn't going to bitch at him if he left the orange juice on the counter.

The fight came back to him suddenly. He'd been able to move past it, which he'd always figured to be one of his unique talents. Where other people dwelled, he stopped, got over it, and went on to other things. He'd been so angry with Addison, angrier still when she disappeared after surgery. She stuck around long enough to tell the parents that there wasn't anything to be done, which felt like bullshit, but not long enough to listen to them sobbing in the surgical waiting room. He'd been practicing what to say, every last word of it, but he couldn't find her, and it wasn't until Burke said, I know where she usually goes, that Alex calmed himself a little. She was sitting so placidly on the gurney too that he didn't get how she could be so unaffected, and took looking at her solidly before he realized that she wasn't unaffected. She wasn't immune. It got to her just like it got to everyone else.

And he had to admit it, he was a little turned on by her yelling at him.

Which was stupid, he knew. She was his boss, blah blah, and so far he'd managed to be the only one out of their intern class sleeping with semi-appropriate people. Izzie, Olivia, they'd been within the bounds of decency. Probably not at the same time, but Izzie had been expecting a lot of him. That had been part of her problem all along.

And Izzie was a different issue totally. When she came out of the kitchen, looking cute as hell and holding a tray of cupcakes, a splotch of chocolate icing on her cheek, Alex felt a flair of something for her. It wasn't the same ridiculous fantasizing that it had once been, but it was akin. He had to lay it out like this: he would have slept with her, if she came to him and said, Oh, Alex, I want you, I need you, take me now, but he wasn't going to pursue her. It had nothing to do with bravado, although her continuous shooting down wasn't fun or funny or anything but humiliating and annoying. It just had to do with the fact that he wasn't there any more. That happened.

"I made cupcakes," Izzie said, her voice and her face bright, but her eyes still a lot sad. Alex got that, how badly the Denny thing messed her up, but there were a lot of things in life that messed up a lot of people, and most people found ways of moving on. He'd tried to be understanding, but there just wasn't that much to say or do. She didn't even want understanding from Alex, and he got that. She wanted the heart guy back, and in the absence of that, she was going to take Alex's company. At first he'd been totally content to sit around and wait for the scraps of her attention, but that got old quicker than it took for Izzie to work through her mental problems, and Alex was just over it already.

He had thought too that moving in with Grey and Izzie was going to be fun, some demented throwback to college, but it wasn't. It made a bad day worse, it made him tired, and worst of all, it made him think of Addison, who was still at work, hustling her ass off, asleep in the on-call room. He should have convinced her to let him come with her. He should have tried harder. Falling asleep on those rock mattresses had to be better than coming down to coffee with Shepherd in the morning. He didn't know who he was kidding—it didn't have shit to do with Shepherd, and it had only slightly more to do with Grey or Izzie. He wanted to see what it felt like to have Addison wake up next to him.

Congratulations, man, he told himself. You are totally fucked.

His next thought, as he took off his coat and eyed Izzie's cupcakes, was what Shepherd would think about Alex wanting to cozy up to his ex-wife. It didn't matter. He saw the way Shepherd barely acknowledged her. And he saw the way Sloan alternately eyed and then bullied her. It didn't matter either how much she exerted her personality, of which she had plenty, because they were still going to act the way they were going to act. Get all into one girl, forget about the last one. It made Alex antagonistic towards Shepherd, and he couldn't even really explain it.

"Are you going to try some?" Izzie finally asked, her disdain at his silence obvious. Everything Izzie did was obvious. He had never met anyone in his life who spent so much time being obvious as she did.

"Did someone else die?" Alex said, and it was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and once it was gone, he kissed his ass goodbye. Izzie's face hardened, and she withdrew her offer of cupcakes physically and then turned to go back into the kitchen.

"You're such an asshole," she threw over her shoulder at him.

"Oh, like I haven't heard _that_ one before."

Izzie slammed something in the kitchen, maybe the cupcakes against the counter, and six months ago he might have gone in to antagonize her some more. Six months ago, he would have enjoyed pissing her off to the point of redness in her cheeks and something undeniably mean on her tongue, something she would have been surprised to say. It wasn't six months ago though, and he was too busy trying to figure out what perfume Addison wore, because it was driving him crazy, to care about what the hell Izzie was doing in the kitchen.

He would have gotten away too, if it weren't for Meredith coming down the stairs in only her bra, carrying two different sweaters. "Alex, you're a boy," she said, and he stood at the foot of the stairs wanting nothing more than to take his shoes off, have a beer, and wash it all down with some wet dreams about Christie Brinkley. "Which one do I wear?"

George had told him that Meredith and Izzie walked around in their underwear, and somehow what Alex pictured were late-night pillow fights, feathers flying, and then maybe, probably licking honey off of each other's chests. It wasn't O'Malley's fault everyone thought he was gay. They _turned_ him gay. Alex stared at Meredith, answerless, and then she called to Izzie, whose opinion mattered a lot more anyway, Alex knew, at least according to girl logic.

"We promised George we'd go to dinner with him and Callie," Meredith said, and Alex eyed the stairs, trying to determine whether or not he could slip around her without her noticing.

"God, I forgot about that," Izzie said from the doorway, and the disdain was, as usual, evident in her voice. "Do we have to go? I mean, could we call and tell him we won't go if she's going to be there?"

"We can't, Iz—" Meredith started, but Alex was the one to turn to Izzie and say, "Dude, she's his _wife_."

"Yeah, but that was a total mistake," Izzie was quick to reply, and Alex didn't know why he hadn't caught it before, the brutal and catty overtones. Were women always like this? He'd slept with enough to know, but it was more often than not that women had two sides—the one they showed to the world, and the one they let loose when it was only other women around. The truth was, maybe he just hadn't noticed, and maybe it was his exhaustion or the fact that he held a barely dead newborn in his hands earlier that day, or the fact that he'd never heard Addison straight-up bitch about someone else the way Izzie ragged on not only Callie but everyone else she knew, but he was suddenly so angry with her he could shake her.

"So?" he said to Izzie, and there was his second wind, the one he'd been waiting on all day. "Since when is that your deal?"

"He's my best friend," Izzie said, but it was so weak that she had to have known it, and Alex looked back to Meredith, looking for a little help, because Meredith had almost always had her shit together, and even when she was angry with people, she couldn't seem to find it in herself to abuse them, but Meredith just stood on the steps and shrugged.

"Fuck that," he said, turning to grab his keys from where they'd been sitting for a grand total of ten minutes, "I'm going back to the hospital."

…

It wasn't outside the on-call room but inside that he started to panic. Outside, he'd been totally sure of himself, absolutely positive that she'd have no problems with him showing up here like this. Outside, it was really easy to remember exactly the way she'd looked at him right before she kissed him at Joe's. Once he opened the door, and she was the only one in there, curled up in her scrubs on the bottom bunk, shoving her arm over her eyes to shield the light, he was a big mass of nerves. Who was he fucking kidding? He was going to walk into the on-call room and tell his boss that he was going to sleep with her for the night because his roommates were assholes? It didn't matter that she was a gorgeous, vibrant woman. She was still the She-Shepherd, and she could still kick his ass.

And yet, he had one chance, and he told himself, Man up, Karev. What was the worst she could do? Tell him he'd be on her service for forever? Like that was such a tragedy at this point. He hung up his jacket on the corner of the bunks, and then he got down on his knees next to the bed, letting his eyes adjust to the light, and his hand found her shoulder first and then the side of her face. She reached for her pager like a nasty habit, and when she muttered, "Did I miss a page?" he had the unmistakable urge to kiss the side of her neck.

There was a smooth way to do this and an uncool way, Alex knew. He was the king of the cool way, and when he opened his mouth to be suave, what came out was the uncool way—"I moved in with Meredith and Izzie," he said, and then—_fuck_, what does she care about that? Make it relevant, make it relevant, he told himself. "And they're, like, mad women." Well, that helped. And then he decided to go for the gamble, because he was close enough to smell that perfume that drove him nuts, and he said, "Can I just crash here tonight?"

The suave way had gone to the dogs. He didn't even know what he was saying anymore. He had a hundred and one lines that didn't even sound like lines any more, because they were all so God-damned true, like that she was gorgeous or that he wanted to wake up with her. He moved his hand to his shoulder and then down to her lower back, and she responded, but instead of moving away from his touch, like he expected, she moved into it, and that made him ballsier. He kissed her cheek, another gamble, and he said, "No funny business, I promise."

"Just don't push me off the bed," came her quick response.

Well, _fuck_, he thought, because there was that panic in his chest again. What the hell did he think he was doing? You may be Alex Karev, but she's Addison Montgomery, and she is way the hell out of your league, he said to himself, but when he opened his mouth, he surprised himself. "If I do, you can hit me."

"It's a deal."

She was like a kid, and she was vulnerable. And she was trusting him to be good to her. There wasn't any logic, no thought process behind it, and when he toed off his shoes and then crawled into bed with her, his arm found its way around her waist like they'd been doing this for ages. It fucked him up, how much she trusted him, and he nuzzled her nose with his and whispered, "Go back to sleep." Whatever. He'd let it mess with him in the morning.

…

He had this habit of telling women he slept with that he had bad dreams, which usually seemed to work for him, most of them assuming he had some dark, hidden secret, but the truth was he hated staying the night in someone else's bed. He never invited anyone over, and he never stayed the night. They weren't relationship rules so much as they were just things he'd always done, and there was a girlfriend, Amanda—not even really a girlfriend, just a girl he was sleeping with, years ago who told him that he had some kind of mental problem. Probably, he told her, but he had an excuse.

It was his internal clock that woke him up before the other person did, like some kind of sick alarm system. It gave him the opportunity to get the hell out if he needed to, which he usually did. Women usually wanted to cuddle and eat breakfast together, and all Alex ever wanted to do was get out.

When he woke up in the on-call bed with Addison, way before her pager ever woke them both up, her back was to him, which meant she'd shifted in the night. It had to be the fact that there was no way either of them got enough sleep, but he was okay to tighten his arm around her and press the front of his body against the back of hers. Her hair hit his face, usually a pet peeve—he hated getting that mouthful of hair, but he just brushed it aside and kissed her shoulder. They both smelled like the hospital, but that was weirdly reassuring to him. It was the closest thing to home he'd had in a long time. What that made Addison, he didn't know. He didn't have to know. There was no way he was going to start defining things before they'd even slept together. They could just do this for a while, this hanging around in an on-call bed thing. That was pretty uncomplicated, as far as things went. This Alex could handle.

…

When the door opened and closed again, he was pretty sure it was Addison, and she could crawl back into the bed with him if she wanted to. She'd have to shove him to the other side of the mattress, but he was giving her an excuse to touch him, which he knew she wanted to do and about which he'd be lying if he said he didn't want her to.

"Alex," he heard, muffled through the pillow over his head, and that was not Addison. Nevermind that Addison never called him anything but his surname, he could recognize that voice from a million miles off. It was like, what were those things, the sirens? Luring sailors to their deaths? That was the only part of Greek and Roman Mythology he'd paid attention to in college.

"Izzie," he said back, his face still pressed into the mattress, the pillow still pressed to the back of his head. It was weird to him, the way she was still around all the time, hovering. How many times could she tell him to fuck off and then still be there, pressing herself into his business? And was it so bad to just want the redhead to come back and crawl into his arms again? Seriously, where was the justice?

The problem was, he legitimately cared about Izzie. He'd made that obvious. And he didn't know how to be any more prostrate for her than he already was. He wasn't going to lay down on coals for her, but he'd take care of her when she needed it, when she let him. It was her fault—all the time _telling_ him to back off but beckoning him onward, and that fucked him up just as much as his wanting to sleep the entire night with Addison. And both women aside, all he really wanted to do was go back to sleep.

The bed heaved under Izzie's weight as she sat down on the bunk next to him. One, two, three, he counted, giving her the appropriate pace, and then—"It's so weird, you and Dr. Montgomery sleeping in here at the same time. I mean, was it like a slumber party?" Her voice was weirdly hopeful, but Alex didn't know why that would be the case. Maybe it was the fact that everyone was just moving on, rotating out of the gravitational pull of Izzie Stevens. That sort of thing usually pissed women off.

"Go away, Izzie," he said, and he covered the back of the pillow with his hands. If he was lucky, the move would block any and all noise out.

But no—she had that supersonic voice thing that God apparently gave to all women, and when she reached for the pillow and said, "You know what, I don't even care. You're allowed to do whatever you want," he felt obliged to roll over and look at her.

"Thanks, mom," he said, and he pressed a fist against his mouth to stifle a yawn. He didn't know what time it was, but Izzie wasn't in her scrubs yet, which meant he wasn't late for anything yet. He knew he probably seemed like he wasn't all that into the medical thing, but he wasn't going to fail, not at this. They could all yell at him until they were purple in the face, but he wasn't going to back down, and he wasn't going to be scared off. They were just going to have to find someone else to beat up on.

"Alex, are you mad at me?" she asked after a blissful moment of silence. He'd almost contemplated going back to sleep, but then there was her voice again. He hated that question. He hated that question like he hated 'what are you thinking?' and 'do I look fat in this?' That question was why he tried not to date if he could help it.

"I'm not mad at you."

"Because if you are, I just think that's really stupid. Especially if you're mad about the Callie thing. God, Alex, if you knew her—"

"Do _you_ know her?"

He was too tired to have this conversation with Izzie. He was too tired for her to get angry with him just because he was sticking up for Torres, who wasn't there to stick up for herself. She'd put a chokehold on Izzie anyway, but Izzie wasn't giving her a chance to fight back. It was just bitch-bitch-bitch, which drove him crazy, and when he sat up and moved to sit with his back against the wall, Izzie joined him. "I know all I need to know," she said, and her tone had become defensive. "She's no good for George."

Alex laughed, and then the laugh turned into a yawn, and he wondered if Addison had an office somewhere where he could curl up and go back to sleep. And there she was, on his mind again. He was going to have to put that into the bad sign category. "Dude's getting laid, Izzie. That's the best he's had in a while."

"He doesn't know what's best for himself."

"And you do?"

"Don't be mad at me, Alex."

It was all circular and a little pathetic to him, and he groaned and said, "I already told you I wasn't mad at you. It's not my deal. But if O'Malley's mad at you, he probably has the right to be. We're fine."

"We're fine?"

She sounded so small, so much smaller than she'd ever been before Denny, and it was the least he could do to lean over and wrap his arm around her shoulders. She'd once demanded sex from him in a supply closet, and now she was spending all her time running scared and too involved in what other people were doing. That Denny Duquette, he'd really done a number on her.

…

Jason Cunningham, who was Baby McEnroe's dad, whether by design or by accident—Alex hadn't had the heart to ask—stood in front of the vending machine just outside of the NICU. Alex was swinging by just to check on the kid, who was getting healthier by the day but would need some really serious surgery—and they had to wait until his heart was strong enough before they could operate; his pre-rounds were done, and Bailey was throwing him in the pit for the day to practice his suturing, she'd said, and his window of time was maybe seven minutes before someone noticed he was missing and called out the dogs. If he was smart at all, he'd have turned around and gone down to the pit and left Cunningham there to figure out the vending machine on his own, but Alex had never prided himself on his brain.

"You have to—" Alex called from down the hall, and he realized there was no good way to demonstrate, so he went to the vending machine and smashed his fist against the coin intake. "State-of-the-art equipment. Shitty vending machines."

Cunningham looked at him, grateful, and then went to retrieve his soda that had tumbled into the slide below, and that was Alex's good deed for the day. He didn't want to stay, because he didn't want to look at Cunningham, who was younger than he was and had a kid in intensive care; Alex had had his share of pregnancy scares, and they'd all been just that, scares, and he couldn't imagine being where Cunningham was, worried about his girlfriend, worried about his baby, just trying to get a Fanta from a hospital vending machine.

And Alex knew it didn't really matter if they knew that Addison was the best they were going to get. That never mattered to anyone. All that really mattered was the loss, and Alex had seen enough to know that people usually didn't take stock until that happened. He'd told them that they didn't have to worry with Addison, that she had the best hands in the biz, but it had done little to reassure them. They were scared. They were confused. They were sad. And there just wasn't anything Alex could do or say to make that better. He was the worst person to do it too, because he'd seen too many babies die lately. They did die, and sometimes horribly, and sometimes it came as a surprise, and sometimes parents expected it. That never made it easy, and Alex's job was continuously harder.

"Dr. Karev," Cunningham said as Alex started to turn away. 'Dr. Karev,' the guy said, and it reminded Alex that he wasn't in medical school anymore. He wasn't just dicking his way through classes. He was a doctor. He was Alex Karev, MD., and in his scrubs and his white lab coat, he probably looked the part too. He thought back to what Addison had said only the day before—get over yourself. Yeah, he was getting over himself. "Dr. Karev, do you think—I mean, your honest medical opinion, do you think he's going to be okay?"

His 'honest medical opinion' was shit. It was a lot of things read out of a lot of textbooks, and it didn't matter what he had to say. The kid was either going to die or he wasn't, and he was going to do it with or without a name. He saw Addison's face every time she had to write Baby McEnroe on a chart, every time she had to tell a nurse to take care of incubator number 4, like it was a pet, a lizard, a forest of sea monkeys. Like it was an _it_ and was never going to be a _him_.

"My honest medical opinion is that … we're going to do the best we can. And your kid is going to get great medical care. Dr. Montgomery is the best. And between you and me? The most you can do for your kid is to start fighting. Because if you give up the fight before it's even started, you're going to spend the rest of your life wondering what difference holding in there could have made."

It was out-of-bounds. It wasn't textbook. Addison would have his head on a platter if she knew, but Addison could kiss his ass—these people needed hope, and how fucked up would it be of him to take that away? Cunningham looked at him a little bleakly, and Alex added, "Oh, and give the kid a name. That was the first step."

…

In the pit, it was Dr. Mrs. O'Malley who came up behind him and said, "So are you going to ask her out, or are you just going to piss her off a lot?"

It shouldn't have been funny to him that Izzie's distaste for Callie Torres O'Malley-whatever made Alex want to get to know her better, but it was funny, and he knew how much it would piss her off, but he knew that women hated other women for two reasons: jealousy and men. He was pretty sure Izzie didn't want O'Malley, and if she did, she was beyond screwed, which meant she had to be jealous of Callie. And he was eager to find out what it was she was so jealous of. Maybe this was part of her—the way she could say whatever she wanted without fear of retribution. The truth was, Callie would just put him in that chokehold if he said anything against her.

He turned to look at her from where he stood, filling out a patient's chart, and he said, "Who is it I'm supposed to be asking out?"

"Don't be a dumbass," Callie said, and she crossed her arms over her chest. Maybe Izzie was jealous of the fact that Callie seemed to have picked up the backbone Izzie left on the ground when she spent days in her prom dress. "She likes you, but if you don't ask her out, I'm kind of scared Mark Sloan is going to make her an offer she's too exhausted to refuse."

"What does Sloan have to do with this?"

"Just ask her out, Karev." She reached past him for the chart underneath his, and when she retrieved it, she folded her arms around it and pressed it to her chest. "She's my friend. And I will not hesitate to kick your ass. So, you know, take her dancing or something."

That was all Callie said, and she left him to go take care of other patients. He hadn't had people this involved in his business since high school, and it left him a little flabbergasted. Besides, he hated dancing—but he liked Addison. And it was a kick in the ass that she might go for Sloan if he didn't move fast enough. At first, it pissed him off—how dare she come up to him and demand that he do anything that didn't have to do with surgery. How dare she tell him what to do—and then he got it. It just wasn't ego. She was looking out for him as much as she was looking out for Addison, and he closed his chart and thought, I could totally kiss you, Callie O'Malley.

…

Mark Sloan had been pissing Alex off for a while, and he pissed him off the most when it had to do with Addison. He got that their back story was complicated, that their affair had been tumultuous and earth-shattering, that it ended a marriage; he hadn't ever really heard Addison's side of it, but he heard Meredith's version of Addison's side of it, which wasn't very flattering, and Alex was smart enough to draw his own conclusions.

And he could see Sloan through the window of Exam Room 2, and he could see the way Addison's body visibly tensed the second he entered her vicinity. He was a jackass, and he upset Addison. She couldn't possibly go back to him, Alex thought, but they had all that history working in their favor, and that pissed him off too.

The problem was they didn't have anything going on, he and Addison. There was no word to describe them, nothing that he could really sit down and tell his mom, and even their making out had been pretty tame, but they had an _understanding_. He was free to climb into the on-call bed with her, and she was allowed to kiss him in the NICU, and—seriously, Addison? You'd get back with him?

The whole thing put him off-kilter. He wasn't used to getting angry about a woman; _at_ he'd always been able to handle, but _about_ was a different story. And there was something off-putting about Baby McEnroe and his parents, who still hadn't given their kid a name, and the Izzie thing bothered him, and when he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall, he knew he was sulking a little bit. What he really wanted to do was go out there, wrap his arm around her waist, and ask what he could do to help. Just to say, Hey, McSteamy, or whatever the hell the other interns call you, back the hell off. Can't you see you're upsetting the lady?

He could foresee Addison punching him in the face for that one, so he stayed exactly where he was. This was why he didn't let himself get attached to people. He had a pretty long history of anger problems, bad enough that he put someone in the hospital once, someone he was supposed to love but had never really been able to bring himself to, and he didn't like when he got this way about people. He was itching to punch Mark Sloan, and the last thing he needed was that black mark against his record or a stern talking to from the chief, and he really didn't need to alienate Sloan any more than he already had.

When they came into the room, Addison went to stand by the door, and he met her eyes briefly. He wanted to find a way to say, Hey, hey, ignore him, but there was no good way to do it, and she looked too keyed-up to care. There was just no getting around Sloan and getting around the fact that he was necessary, at least to the surgical side of this, and when he sat down on the bed next to the family, Alex tried to remind himself that this wasn't about him, and it wasn't about Addison. It was about this family and their tiny baby, who still needed a name and still needed the best medical help Seattle Grace could provide. If that meant Mark Sloan, well, Alex was going to have to shut up and deal with it.

And then Sloan opened his mouth.

"I have to be honest with you, and I know honesty isn't something you're used to hearing, but it's good not to keep your expectations high. I can fix the cleft, that's not a problem, but judging from your son's file, he's going to need at least—"

"Dr. Sloan," Addison said, and Alex and Meredith looked at each other. "Dr. Sloan, do you really think that's—"

"Do you want me to lie to them, Addison? I think we owe it to—"

"I think you need to come out in the hallway with me. Mr. and Mrs. McEnroe, if you'll excuse us."

The atmosphere in the room was suddenly personal. There had been a time when Addison almost ripped him a new one for being too honest with a patient, and this wasn't honesty. This wasn't Sloan just doing them a favor. This was Sloan hijacking Addison's patient—_Alex's_ patient. This was Sloan getting back at Addison for something that Alex didn't know about, and he didn't need to know about it. Addison grabbed Sloan's arm and dragged him out of the room, and when the door slammed shut behind them, Alex knew there was only one thing to do.

And it was weird to Alex, because nobody had ever reminded him of his dad before save druggies and wife-beaters, but Sloan suddenly did. If he wanted to passive-aggressively beat up on women in some bizarre psychological way, he was going to have to do it to a woman Alex didn't care about. And he did care about her. He cared about her a lot, and he watched them through the windows and realized that if Sloan so much as laid a hand on her, he was going to bust a nut.

"Dr. Karev?" Cunningham said to him, which brought Alex back to reality. They looked scared and overwhelmed, and they'd just had the foremost plastic surgeon to relocate from New York to Seattle tell them that things didn't look so good. If he was where they were, he'd be shitless too, and it was time to step up and be a surgeon. "Dr. Karev, did he mean that?"

God, that pissed him off—that Sloan could be so cavalier to just rip that hope away from them. Maybe it wasn't his job to give them hope, but he was going to do his damnedest. "He meant that," Alex felt forced to say, and he looked to Meredith, who didn't have shit to say in the way of help. "But he's not paying attention to the fact that you have the best surgeons in Seattle working to help your kid. And what he means is, what he was saying before Dr. Montgomery had to talk to him, is that it's good to prepare for the worst—but you've got to keep hoping for the best. For that kid in there who needs you."

Cunningham's girlfriend, Baby McEnroe's mother, looked up at Cunningham, and maybe Alex was kidding himself, but for a second they looked a little soothed. Like maybe he had made a difference. Like maybe he _could _make a difference.

"Could we, maybe, have some time alone?" McEnroe's mother said, and Alex looked to Meredith, and both of them nodded. They could have all the time in the world, but that didn't mean their kid had any more time to give.

Leaving them alone meant going back out towards admitting, and Alex opened the door with hesitation. They were fighting, Addison and Sloan, but as far as he could tell, Addison was winning. She'd always win every fight, and there was a surge of pride in him, a kind of 'atta girl' for Addison, and she didn't glance at him or at Grey as they opened the door. She continued without a pause, saying, "It's just _not_, Mark. And it hasn't been for almost eleven months now. So you walk back in there and you tell them that you can fix their child's cleft. And then you tell them to name their baby and _fight, _because they may not get another chance. And then you do your job. That's it."

Alex prepared himself to step between them, but suddenly Callie was there, wrapping her hands around Addison's arms, dragging her off only God-knew-where, and it was then that Alex had the nerve to stand up to Sloan. Sloan was watching Addison as she left, and when he noticed Alex there, he said, "What the hell are you looking at?"

Just a piece of shit, Alex almost said, which was exactly what he'd said to his dad before punching him in the face, but what he said instead was, "You're a real douchebag, you know that?"

Sloan balked, and Alex sized him up the same way he might have a wrestling opponent. Sloan was a big guy, but Alex could take him. He'd spent most of his life figuring out how to take down guys bigger than he was. "I'm sorry," Sloan said, "aren't you an _intern_?"

And that was the first time he punched Mark Sloan. It felt good, and he realized he'd been wanting to do that for a really long time, and when Sloan stumbled backwards, clutching the side of his face, Alex had a moment of triumph. "Quit treating her like she's shit, dude," Alex said to him, and it took Sloan a moment of realization before he shook his head and replied:

"She's never going to sleep with you, Karev. She's so far out of your league—"

And that was the second time he punched Mark Sloan.

To be continued.


	6. I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

**Viscosity**

_ Summary: _In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post-Some Kind of Miracle.

_Rating:_ T.

_Author's note: _ This chapter's a little fluffy and probably best enjoyed with a bucket of popcorn. Also, you guys are terrific as usual. Thank you so much for everything you've said about my story, whether it's been positive or constructive criticism. I do read everything, and as much as I'd like to address everyone's comments individually, it's just not practical, so, that said, I'm keeping everything in mind that you've said, and I think any concerns that anyone has had so far will be worked out in due time.

Also! I'm really not going to pay attention to spoilers or what might actually happen for the rest of the season. They are dismaying. I'm also mostly ignoring Alex's Jane Doe, except for the random vague references, just because I'm not entirely sure where they're going with it and I don't want to deal with it. Alright, on to the story.

* * *

Chapter 6: I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

It was finally over, the week of shifts that would never end, and Callie was the one who insisted they go out for drinks. Not to Joe's, Addison said, but Callie wasn't having any of it. I want to sit just down the bar from Izzie Stevens and Meredith Grey, Callie said, and Addison decided Callie was so much more of a glutton for punishment than Addison was, but she grabbed her coat and went along. There had always been something disturbing about Joe's to Addison, something incestuous; there was no way that, back in New York, a group of surgeons would sit around a bar, drinking together, unless it was under the pretense of 'business', and even then most of them would find other things to do. Do not mix work and play, that had been her cardinal rule, but rules were made to be broken at Seattle Grace, or at the very least bent beyond recognition.

The thing about it was that she had a friend, a good, solid, healthy friend for the first time in a very long time. The last really solid friend Addison had was Mark, and it seemed unlikely that she and Callie were going to hit the sheets together and break at least three people's hearts in the process. So when Joe brought them their beers, Addison told him to put it on her tab. He laughed and asked if she needed him to call a taxi for her after four, as was her usual rule, and Callie was the one who spoke up to say, "Nah, I've got her back."

"Okay, but no dancing on the bar."

Callie snorted and said, "These guys should be so lucky."

"Damn straight," was Addison's contribution, and Callie clinked their beer bottles together.

It was strange to Addison to have a friend who had slept with Mark. Maybe it was a sign of maturity or her emotional detachment or both, but she found it funny to think of Callie, so with it and together, giving in to the pathetic machinations of one Mark Sloan. Not that she was fooling anyone, because she wouldn't have been able to count the times Mark had won her over on two hands and two feet, but that was a little different, she liked to tell herself, because she'd been there through every break-up, good or bad, she'd been there through every lost patient, through every failed test, God, through every bad haircut, so who could blame her for breaking off a piece of that? Callie had no excuse. Nobody had ever had any excuse. Not even me, she thought sulkily, no matter how much she wanted to pretend she did.

She took a look at her already half-empty beer and decided that for the night she had probably better play it safe. Exhaustion was already making her a little loopy. She didn't need to add drunk to the list of reasons why she behaved poorly.

"So, Callie O'Malley."

"So, Addison Montgomery-I-Sleep-With-Interns-Too-Whatever. Inquiring minds want to know. You and Karev, seriously hooking up in the restroom?"

It was what felt like the eightieth time that day defending her nonexistent sex life. She'd spent more time trying to think of how to explain away whatever was going on with Karev than she ever had explaining what had happened with Mark. At least with Mark, the pattern was simple. Adultery was adultery was adultery was what it was. Mark was easy to deal with. Mark she understood. Mark told her what she needed to know—sleeping with Mark was like dancing with a very bossy dance partner. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. Karev was all angles and complicated dance moves that he was expecting her to lead him through, and Callie was looking at her with an expression that said she'd already decided what she thought it was. Addison considered leaving it there, but that was part of this whole new friend thing she had to deal with—forthcoming detail-sharing. That was what women did with each other.

"I didn't even get my hand down his scrubs, and I don't know who that says more about."

"Him," Callie was quick to say. "It doesn't matter what the situation or who the guy is, if there's no sex, it has more to say about the man than it does the woman."

"How do you figure?"

"Well, look at it this way. Women have sex for all kinds of reason, and because of that, if we want to have sex, we can find a reason. Men want to have sex just to have sex. You with me? If a woman, healthy, sexually active, attractive, cannot find a good enough reason to get a man naked—and trust me, the man will always be ready, willing, and able, then it's got to do with the man. Maybe you just weren't that into it."

"I was into it."

"And you can bet he was into it. Because men just _are_. Maybe it had to do with the fact that it was the restroom. That's still his fault. Woman's rule #1—it's always his fault, even when it isn't."

"That would have helped me with my marriage."

Callie laughed and told Addison to drink up, and Addison looked at the bottle again, and she realized this was _nice_ and healthy and good, sitting here with her like this. She'd had friends in New York, sure, Savannah and Weiss, for two, but they were her friends in the context of Addison-and-Derek, and now that there was no more Addison-and-Derek, Addison wasn't sure that there was an Addison-and-Derek-and-Savannah-and-Weiss.

"How did you know it was over?" Callie asked.

"The first time or the second time?"

There was a time, months before, when she didn't want to talk about it. She was all talked out, in fact, and nobody was asking. She was the bad guy, the villain, Satan, as Derek might have said. And there was a time, months before, when she was the Grand Empress of Ruining Meredith Grey's Life, and nobody stopped to inquire about how she'd managed to be the Queen of Ruining Her Own Life months before that. Nobody bothered to ask, and Addison hated to be me-me-me about it, but it was about damn time that someone was Addison-Addison-Addison about the situation. And now that it was months later and nobody was waiting for her to leave so Derek and Meredith could just reunite—as though she were the only snag in their perfect relationship, as though Addison hadn't come _years_ before—she could finally talk about it. Frankly, accurately, and she could give it the full and proper time it deserved.

The saddest part of it was, even with all her newfound freedom, she just didn't have anything left to say. She was all Marked and Dereked out.

"The second," Callie said. "You know, when you really knew."

"Oh, I really knew the first time. I just spend a lot of time sunning by the Nile. He had this look, this kind of I'm-Derek-Shepherd-and-I-Never-Give-Up-On-Anything-But-I'm-Giving-Up-On-This thing, and he kicked me out of our house. That was the first time. He didn't even have to do anything, he just looked at me, and I thought, Oh, well. Well, I've broken it."

"Did I ever tell you I walked in on them, kind of post-coital-glowy. I told Meredith that I wasn't going to tell anyone, because I thought I needed to have her on my side. I thought we were friends, or we were going to be."

Months ago, it might have felt like a betrayal, and the admission would have been proof positive, but in the here and now it felt like a confidence, like the solidifying of a true friendship. Addison didn't have anything left to be angry with Derek for, and that came when she saw the way he cared about her after her accident. Nobody talked about it. Nobody called her on it, asked her, Hey, Meredith Grey, did you try to kill yourself? Did you just give up? That was what Derek had thought too, breaking down that day outside of Ellis Grey's room. Nobody gave Meredith Grey hell for it. That bothered her more than Derek-and-Meredith bothered her, and even that had ceased to sting.

Derek had loved Addison, categorically, one hundred percent. She didn't need professions of it or daily reminders, and she hadn't even kept the ring, which would have served. They both made promises to each other that they broke. They both fell in love with other people. They were each other's training wheels, in a way, and it was just a shame they'd had to get married and divorced to figure that out.

"I don't think Meredith Grey lets just anyone in," Addison said, and she picked up her beer bottle and started to peel off the label. "But she's had a lot to deal with."

"So have you," Callie pointed out, and Addison laughed a little and shrugged.

"The second time I was standing outside Meredith's room, and Derek was curled up on the bed next to her, and I knew then that we were over. Derek-and-Addison were over. On paper, we'd ended months before. But Derek-and-Addison, I think we finally died that day." She laughed again and straightened herself up in her chair. "But that's depressing. You and George are fine, aren't you?"

"Oh, we're fine. I just get … it's weird, because can you even remember the last time it mattered what your friends thought of the guy you were with? Weren't we all over that in, like, junior high school?"

"You forget that medical school emotionally stunts people."

"Seriously. And Izzie Stevens and Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang too probably are like this vicious little mean girls clique. We're incapable of having actual adult relationships, so the second anyone, I don't know, _has_ one, people just flip out."

"This is nice."

"What is, getting drunk and bitching about people?"

"Well—yes. Having friends … is nice."

Callie looked at her, and she laughed, and she was beginning to feel a little intoxicated, but maybe, at least for tonight, that was for the best. She had a solid thirty hours of no hospitals, no urgent pages, no late-night phone calls and no dire surgeries. It was time this town figured out that she was not the only neonatal surgeon around. She was entitled to some decent rest, and the only way she could foresee that happening was if she got drunk enough to pass out.

"Cute intern alert," Callie suddenly said as Addison signaled for Joe to bring them another beer or four. It was bad, Addison decided, that just the idea of Karev coming through the door got her heart tachycardic, and she refused to turn to look to see whether it was her cute intern or Callie's—_her_, as though she had some sense of ownership. It was her good sense, or what she was perfectly prepared to convince herself was good sense, to counter, Well, Addison, what's so wrong with having some _feelings_ every once in a while? It would have been ludicrous of her to lock herself away from humanity, Mark excepted, because sleeping with Mark was like putting on an ancient pair of sweatpants—they will always fit, but chances are they don't make you look good anymore, and the fabric is probably so worn thin that they're not even very comfortable, and, well, Addison forgot, but she knew her metaphor had been brilliant in its inception.

She'd become a lightweight. And the point, the one she was trying to make to herself, was that she deserved to have a little fun, drink a few beers, and not resign herself to the life of the tired divorcee. To hell with that. If Derek was going to fall in love with someone new, then she was going to too. There was that word again, _love_, and tomorrow she would have the freak-out, and she would feel bad for breaking promises to Mark, and tomorrow she'd invite him out for coffee and tell him that it just wasn't going to happen between them, not now, not ever again, but tonight, tonight she really just wanted to dance. Tomorrow she'd deal with Mark. And the hangover. And whatever else.

"Earth to Addison," Callie said, and Joe put the beers down on the bar in front of her. She didn't usually like to get intoxicated in public, because she liked to be like Caesar's Wife—above reproach. She could never allow any room for someone to say anything like, Well, Dr. Montgomery was at a bar all last night. She couldn't give anyone an excuse to think less of her—but everyone, from the nurses at the bar to the med students in the booth in the corner, had sinned and fallen short of the glory of whatever it was.

"Sorry, no, I'm here," Addison said, and she went promptly for the next bottle of beer. Beer was boring to her suddenly, and she signaled for Joe again—maybe something fun, like a margarita, or maybe she'd go wild and crazy and order a couple of kamikaze shots—and her arm slammed into the moron who'd been stupid enough to come and stand behind her bar stool.

It was no moron, it was a cute intern, who was taking his time to rub his jaw where she'd just slugged him. She went for a swig of her new beer and said, "Well, hello, Dr. Karev."

He laughed and moved his jaw from side to side with his hand. "Dude, is everyone trying to kill me today?"

God, _Mark_, her stomach said, and then, Shut up and drink, her brain said, and she decided to follow the impulse of the latter. There was no getting rid of the image of Mark, petulant and sour-faced in the elevator, as though she'd been the one to issue the punching orders. No getting rid of, of course, without the aid of the Guinness in her hand. She downed another swig of it, and Karev took the seat next to her. For the first time she noticed Izzie Stevens and Cristina Yang and Meredith Grey down at the other end of the bar in their usual positions, and maybe it had been forced blind-sidedness, a willingness simply not to see something that might make her antsy and upset—and Grey tended to have that effect on her. There was no tension though, no gnawing at the pit of her stomach, and the reminders of Derek were peripheral. People were not so wrong when they said that breaking up was hard to do—but it did get easier. She was oddly unaffected by Meredith Grey. God, that was fantastic.

What was even better was Karev's arm over the back of her chair. She was going to have to say that that was _stellar_, and then came her next conundrum— she wanted to kiss him. Nothing fancy, just a simple 'hello, how are you, it was nice having you between my legs earlier in the bathroom', not like she could say that, but she almost _could_, if she could get her kiss just so. Men never thought about these things, she felt positive, and she nursed her beer for a second and debated: a cheek kiss? Or did she put her hand under his chin and pull him to her and kiss just the corner of his mouth? Could she—how daring—get away with giving him a good and proper kiss directly on the mouth? Hadn't they been sitting almost here exactly the first time they kissed?

This was, as yet, the biggest decision of her off-duty hours, and she viewed it sullenly as testament that over a decade of marriage had completely ruined her for dating. She wouldn't greet him with a kiss, she decided. If they wanted to kiss, they would do it later, and it would be organic and fun and butterfly-inducing, and there would be no thought put into it at all. And then, just as she'd come to that conclusion, she felt him move in and kiss her on the hard edge of her jaw, just below her ear, and when she looked at him with surprise, he pulled back and grinned and then said, "You looked like you were thinking too hard."

She could have jumped his bones in that moment—and did people even still say that any more? Had she been off her game for so long that the euphemisms had changed? It didn't matter. Jump his bones, get him naked on the bar, the impulse was all the same, and she thanked some unknown nebulous god or goddess that helped men get dressed that Karev's shirt wasn't completely buttoned and he wasn't in his scrubs, and he was Alex now. And he, Alex, was reducing her to a drunken mass of speechlessness.

"Oh, I always think too hard," she managed to say, and it occurred to her that it might have been no time at all, but it could have been twenty minutes since the last time anyone spoke. "You should have known me in medical school. All I did was study. No friends, no sex life."

She paused, hoping she was the only one at the bar doing the quick mental math to determine how old he'd been when she was in medical school. Once, she went to Mark's therapist, because he thought Addison could benefit from a little psychotherapy, and the therapist told her that she was an obsessive-compulsive self-defeating overthinker. She'd agonized for days over that before realizing that not only was she all of those things but a sociopath to boot. Sociopath—whose word was that? Oh, Derek's.

"Is she drunk?" Karev, _Alex_, she corrected herself, said as he leaned over the bar for the bowl of almonds that Joe kept stashed behind.

"She's just being socially irresponsible," Callie said, her tone helpful.

Addison forced herself to focus on anything other than Karev—_Alex—_who, thanks to his reach for the nuts, was now sitting closer than ever. Izzie Stevens, down at the end of the bar, had pivoted her body enough to almost be facing away from the two surgeons and the intern. Stevens had never struck Addison as being rude before, but there she was, childish, simplistic, naïve. She wanted to go over there and tell her to grow up, because nobody else was going to cut her any breaks—but Addison didn't have any room to talk. She had taken all of the breaks she could, the trust fund and the excellent references from people her parents knew. Someone had to teach Izzie Stevens some lessons about respect, about maturity, about life's inescapable way of saying that it didn't matter how well known your name was or what school your piece of paper that served as a degree was issued from. Everyone always got knocked off of their pedestals. Addison was getting knocked down every day.

"Your friends are over there," Addison said to Alex, who frowned and twisted away from them a little. There wasn't a single one of those interns who was paying Alex or Addison or Callie any attention, and it was odd to Addison to still feel scrutinized, like they, the surgeons, the people who had already lived some of the hardest parts of their lives, were the ones trying to reach someone else's expectations. She had always exceeded expectations, and it never would have occurred to her to be impressive to someone she had no regard for if she hadn't been sitting at Joe's, in that spot, with Alex's arm around her.

But it was easy to make that not matter again. It was easy to genuinely laugh that off, and she was proud of herself, just as she'd always been proud of her own ability to _get over it_. Get over it—that was the phrase other people used as an imperative, and Addison amended her vocabulary: overcome. There wasn't a single thing she couldn't overcome.

"Dude, do I look like I care?" Alex said, and at first it sounded abrasive, but when Addison looked at him, she understood that it was affectionate. That was the beautiful complexity of him—how easy it would be to miss the _Alexness_ if she never slowed down to look closely enough. Life lived at half speed was so much more interesting and vibrant, like a highway lined with beautiful scenery that she had never seen before until an accident forced traffic to a crawl. His humor, that trace of it than ran darkly behind his eyes—to think she might have missed it.

"Dude, do I look like your dude?"

"You are seriously drunk."

"You missed the time I decided to get fat. I have an exquisite ability to feel sorry for myself."

"She really does," Callie said, and then it was with appropriate calm and togetherness that she stood up and, taking her beer with her, announced, "I love both of you crazy kids, but if we're going to start with the weird subtexty flirting, I might have to go find my husband."

Alex said something to her about Miranda and the pit and ass-kicking, and Addison had a flash of it, the distinct sense that they had stopped being doctors-at-a-bar and started being people-at-a-bar. Which meant that it was just Addison-and-Alex at a bar, and she couldn't remember the last time she thought of anyone else in hyphens, the way she thought of her and Derek. Addison-and-Derek was so much more of the team than it ever was the physical, romantic, sexual _couple _thing. It had to do with the way they always beat everyone else at Trivial Pursuit, or how everyone could always expect them to be the smartest people in the room. Or how, even when the chips were low, they wouldn't go anywhere. They fought hard, played hard, and they always did it together. That was what Derek-and-Addison meant. So what Addison-and-Alex meant, she just didn't know yet, but she was itching to find out.

"Hey," she said to him, and she twisted in her chair so that she could face him. His legs moved to accommodate hers, and it was a fluid motion, the slide of one leg to the other side of hers so that they enclosed her knees.

"Hey," he said back, and he seemed for a second to not know what to do with his hands, if he should put them on her knees or rest his elbow on the bar, and maybe it was the little bit of alcohol in her system, but in a moment of drunken clarity, she decided it didn't have to be so hard. Being Addison wasn't hard, and she doubted that being Alex was too difficult, and the joining, the Addison-and-Alexing, that shouldn't have been so hard either. He finally decided on the bar, his arm resting against it, and she put hers there too, her elbow touching the inside of his arm, his _flexor carpi radialis,_ the _flexor digitorum profundus_. He still had his coat on, and it was hard to trace the lines of his muscles through the fabric.

"Do you remember your anatomy?" she asked.

"Is that a pick-up line?"

"No, do you remember your anatomy? Do you remember the bones and the muscles? It was so hard for me. Anatomy 101. God, what a nightmare."

"I barely remember what was on my boards, but—yeah, sure, anatomy." He was the first to move, taking her hand in his and then pressing his other hand on top of it, sandwiching her in. With her palm down and their hands hovering over the space between them, he kept one hand underneath hers, supporting her, and it was the other hand that served as pointer. His fingertips ran over the top of her hand, and then he started, tracing the path of each muscle as he spoke, the length of it down her forearm. "Flexor carpi ulnaris," he started, and then he looked to her for approval. "Extensor carpi ulnaris, and this one," and he tapped it to demonstrate, "is the anconeus. Extensor digitorum, brachioradialis, extensor carpi radialis …"

He hesitated, and his eyes met hers, and when she said, "Longus," he echoed her.

"Extensor carpi radialis brevis, abductor pollicis longus. Extensor pollicis brevis. And this," he said, and he ran his fingers around her wrist, "is the extensor retinaculum."

When he met her eyes again, she was struck by the juxtaposition of his confidence, so easy to mistake for arrogance, and his need for approval. He knew he was correct—and he didn't need her to say it, but he _wanted_ her to. "I, uh," he said, and he laughed a little and moved his hand from hers to scratch the back of his head. The other stayed under hers, a tender near-hand-holding—she was aware of every point of contact between their skins—and when he laughed again, she did too, and he said, "I failed my boards. A while ago—but I failed them. The other, uh, the other interns had to help me study."

For a surgeon, the admission of fault or failure was huge. Nobody ever said, 'I was wrong', not a surgeon, and it carried over into personal lives. Surgeons were surgeons were surgeons, whether they had their scrub caps on or not. The scalpel was never far, whether it was literal or figurative, and to remove the ego, the confidence, the lacquer of efficiency and self-reliance required taking the blade to oneself and letting it go as deep as it would go. "I had a D in Anatomy. They wanted to kick me out of the program for not maintaining a B+ average. That, and apparently I had something of a 'bad attitude'."

"You don't do the failure thing, do you?"

"I do the failure thing all the time."

He laughed and let his fingers tangle with hers, and it was then that gravity took their hands and brought them to her knee. "No, what I mean is—other people, it gets to them, failing things. And you fail all the time, and—"

"Oh, thanks, Karev."

"Shut up. What I mean is, you get back up."

You get back up. _Overcome_, that was Addison's work, but she liked that, _get back up_. "Yeah," she said, "I think that's kind of who I am."

"I like it. Who you are."

She'd gotten sober quickly, and she was glad she had, because there was a concise simplicity to that exact moment in time that she would have regretted not being able to remember. Her qualifiers were gone, words like damaged or broken or divorced or old or young or intern or surgeon, and when she asked him if he wanted to come back to her hotel and he said, "Yeah, let's get out of here," she was all out of objections.

…

"I can't believe you're failing anatomy," was what Derek said about it, sitting across from her in her apartment, a copy of _Gray's Anatomy_ on one side of him, a pile of unused index cards on the other side. "Who fails anatomy?"

"Apparently I do," Addison said, "but go ahead, rub it in a little more."

He laughed—Derek laughed at everything, a good, solid genuine laugh, and Addison, who never much laughed at anything, was usually inspired to laugh more when she was around him. That was part of the appeal, not to mention his natural good looks and his charm and his intelligence, and Addison was determined not to like him. The worst thing she could imagine was getting involved with someone from medical school; the timeline on it was brief—they could see each other for a year or two, and then inevitably everyone dispersed to the programs of their choice, and the odds that anyone would see each other again after medical school were slim to none and falling. Addison was not on the market for anything that wasn't going to be her future; all of her friends were getting married, and she didn't have time for that, not with medical school to finish out, her internship, her residency, fellowships, and then maybe, once she became an attending, she could start the family she always dreamed about. Anything less than that was a distraction.

"Addison, just focus," Derek said. "It's all just memorization."

"One day, I am going to do so much better in a class than you are, and I am going to gloat like you wouldn't believe."

"Keep dreaming."

Odds were, even if she dated Derek, it would be for a short time. It might be fun, but it would be nothing meaningful. A fling, maybe, although she hated that word, because it implied it was just going to get tossed away when all was said and done. Even if he did have perfect hair and a great smile, even if he was one of the smartest people she'd ever met. Even if, even if, even if. On this issue, she wouldn't be swayed. She was going to stay celibate.

"Is that a challenge?" Addison had always had a problem with challenges—she couldn't back down. It was like a dare; her reaction was Pavlovian. Derek pulled _Gray's Anatomy_ into his lap and then folded his arms behind his head, looking at her as though he was sizing her up for a fight.

"Do you seriously think you can out-medicine me?"

"Anything you can do, Derek Shepherd, I can do better."

He laughed at her, but he was intrigued, and he said, "Alright. Any course—and I'll let you choose it—and whoever gets the lower grade has to buy the other a drink."

That sounded suspiciously like a date to Addison, but it didn't take her long to amend her decision about him. One drink, what could it hurt—and besides, she was pretty confident he'd be paying. "It's a deal. Now shut up and help me study."

…

Her problem was not with Mark. Nor was it with the smell of him on her sheets or the remnants of his shaving in the bathroom, because that had long been cleaned away by hotel housecleaning. It was the _idea_ of Mark that really got to her, the memory of his standing in the doorway, both of them guiltier than hell when Derek came to the door. It was the idea that she'd been here, guilty and weak and succumbing to him, just like she always did, and that was why she stood at the front desk, negotiating the terms of a new room. "Just take the credit card. I'll pay for two rooms for the night."

Alex had gotten bored with the proceedings. She couldn't blame him. It was well after midnight, and after a little groping in the car on the way over, there came the panic. Panic wasn't even the right word for it—she felt like a hooker, discovering that she still had last night's pair of panties on. She didn't feel trashy, not yet, but she was quickly approaching that line that she should not cross over.

Addison had to distance herself from Mark, whether it was physically or emotionally. She'd already cauterized the wound, but for the same reason she stopped being able to stand sleeping with Mark in the bed that once belonged to her and her husband, she couldn't bring Alex to that hotel room. The man in front of her didn't understand that, and he looked at her blankly and said, "Dr. Montgomery, that's not the problem. We would be more than happy to give you two rooms—for whatever purpose—" His gaze wandered over Addison's shoulder to Alex, and his eyebrow arched in a way that suggested he suspected her of something illicit, and he continued, "but the problem is the hotel is entirely booked. There is a large wedding party staying with us, but if you could wait a few days," and again, his tone implied that he thought her hormones might calm down if she gave herself a few days to cool off, "then I feel certain we could accommodate you."

Accommodate, my ass, she thought, and she glanced back to Alex, who gave her a half-smile, as though he thought she were crazy but cute, and when she turned back to the desk man, she said, "Look, let me lay it out for you. I am exhausted. I spent all day at the hospital. I am still slightly drunk. My room is 2214. There is a man just down the hall from me with whom I inappropriately slept once. Well, several times. About twenty times too many. I would like to no longer be down the hall from him. I would also like to not think about him at all. Ever again, if possible. So you want to know how you can help me? You can find me a new room."

"Dr. Montgomery, while I appreciate the … complexity of your situation, there's simply nothing I can do."

It would be a testament to her strength if she could go back upstairs to her room and ignore the fact that Mark had been there. That Derek had been there. Even if all she and Alex did was watch TV and fall asleep, if she could ignore the bad juju of the room, it might make her a better, stronger, happier, healthier person. But standing her ground and starting over, that might make her better, stronger, happier, and healthier too. After thirty days, human skin cells sloughed off, leaving a new and impressionable layer in its wake. Buildings didn't work the same way. Rooms had memories—and maybe it was finally time to cut ties. Maybe it was even time to find a real place to live, and Alex had asked, as they pulled up in the taxi in front of the hotel, if she seriously lived there, if it made her happy to be permanently transitional. Plenty of people lived in hotels, and Addison couldn't be one of them, not anymore. She needed to not be in transition. She needed roots. That was a change to make tomorrow, however, and the alcohol had worn off almost completely, taking with it her sunny disposition and stellar personality, and she pursed her lips and looked at the man behind the desk and said, "Well. Thank you for trying."

As she turned to go back to Alex, she realized he had joined her, and he set his hand on the concierge's desk, and he said, "So?"

"So, I think we may be at a dead end tonight."

He didn't ask for an explanation why she needed a new room. He didn't question her judgment, and maybe he saw in her her willingness to start over—and to start over with him. They timing was just off, as it had always been, not enough to be detrimental but enough to make them miss each other on proverbial trains, and when she started to say that they should call it a night, that they were both tired and drinking, that she'd had a long day before her and he had a long day ahead of him, he took her hand and he said, "Come on, we're going back to my place."

It was just that simple.


	7. How Fg Romantic

**Viscosity**

_ Summary: _In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post-Some Kind of Miracle.

_Rating:_ T. Maybe a little T+ish.

_Author's note: _Okay, so. I'm moving tomorrow morning, and that means I have no idea when I'll have internet access again, as I have to wait for it to be installed. That said, I will get you guys chapter 8 just as soon as I can. I hope this'll tide you over for now._  
_

* * *

Chapter 7: How F-----g Romantic

The high wore off quickly. It became nonexistent as they pulled up to the front of Meredith Grey's house in the taxicab. It was the end of the honeymoon, and she was going to have to put the kabosh on the field trip to the land of Meredith Grey. Oh no, not just Meredith Grey. Meredith Grey and Izzie Stevens. Meredith Grey, Izzie Stevens, and probably, _probably_, Derek Shepherd. It was cute, she decided, that he wanted to bring her here; cuter still that he was okay with that, like it was an announcement of their tender whatever-the-hell-they-were-doing, but it was clear neither one of them had thought through this at all. This was a bad idea, and Addison was not a fan of bad ideas. She routinely vetoed bad ideas. She had an allergic reaction to bad ideas. She was defined by her fantastic, if slightly dented, armor of sublime decision-making, and going into Meredith Grey's home was going to break her armor in half. What happened when she made bad judgment calls was earth-shattering. Going into that house, possibly not so bad as, for instance, sleeping with Mark, but her ego would never withstand the blow.

Her mind was one hundred percent made up in favor of telling Alex what she was sure they both knew, that she categorically could not go into that house with those girls, until Alex hesitated while paying the cab driver and then looked at her and said, "Maybe this is a bad idea."

Addison had never viewed herself as a contrary person, but that sounded strangely like a challenge. "It was _your_ idea," she pointed out blandly, half-hoping he'd change his mind again and tell her that they absolutely should go in and make out in the kitchen, just so that her position of indignation had a leg to stand on.

"Yeah, I know," he said, drawling out the 'yeah' until it became another word entirely. He scratched the back of his head, and he looked out the window and then back at her. "Dude, you know how they are."

She didn't know, but she could imagine. And the implications of his not wanting her to go suddenly made her furious. Was she supposed to be afraid of a couple of mean, territorial bitter interns? Was she supposed to hide whatever was going on with Alex and be the sole model of discretion? Not only was it hypocritical, it was _insulting_; she had never let anyone scare her off before, and today, she decided, today was not a day to mess with Addison Forbes Montgomery. "No, we're going," she announced, and she opened her car door.

The second she stepped out onto the slightly damp street, her heel wobbling on a rock, her resolve began to disintegrate—only there was no going back. There was no getting back into the car and saying, No, you know, my first instinct was right, this just isn't going to work, this whole you-your-place thing, so if you want to move out and make sure I get that forwarding address, then we can talk, but right now there is no way I am going into that house with those people. Addison's general philosophy had always been that, in the absence of a true backbone, she was going to fake it. It didn't matter if she had one or not; if she could convince other people she did, well, that was all that mattered.

"Addison," Alex said after her, but it was too late. Besides, she could take him. She turned and leaned down so that she could look at him where he still sat inside the cab. The night was chilly but not overwhelmingly so, and she found a weird, unsettling serenity in the knowledge that this house was the place where Derek and Meredith spent a good deal of their free time. Maybe it was shock or the slightly lesser well-known intermediate stage of grief—complete and total detachment. That had always been her favorite stage. Not denial, not bargaining. Just detachment. Calm, cool apathy.

"Alex, be a man." He hesitated, and she watched him, sizing him up. Alex Karev seemed like a man who couldn't resist a challenge, something she absolutely related to, so she arched her eyebrow and said, "unless you've got a problem in that arena."

It was just that easy, and his expression changed in a blink from hesitation to the wicked flair of playful tenacity, and he reached for her, but she pulled away. "Now get out of the car before I just go in there by myself, find your room, and lock you out."

The decision was made, and she was finished weighing the pros and cons. This was a bite-the-bullet situation, she was a bite-the-bullet kind of woman, and if she was digging her own grave, she expected Alex Karev to be there, enjoying the worms and dirt with her. The last time anyone legitimately scared her was during her residency, and it was Richard Weber, and everything else was just illusion. They went to the front door, Alex shortly behind her, and there was no touching, no customary small-of-the-back holding, and when she looked back at him before they reached the awning, she realized that it wasn't that he was afraid, because to be afraid of Izzie Stevens, who was made of pudding, and Meredith Grey, who could have been a jellyfish, was ludicrous, and he didn't seem to be a man concerned about what others thought of him. And maybe, just maybe, what he was so scared of was Addison's judgment call, because wasn't it possible, maybe even probably, that she might decide that she couldn't be with him, whether it was in this nebulous middle space or in a much firmer, more concrete place, if forced to deal with the fact that he was an intern?

She was projecting. It was what she'd be afraid of if she were in his place, but as she looked at him she thought that maybe their places weren't so different, maybe he and she weren't so different. She was going to offer him an out, a simple, 'If you want to, we don't have to—' and it would be the final one, and he spoke first and said, digging his keys out of his front pocket, "It's like the seventh level of hell in there. So don't, you know, decide that you can never come back. Because that'd suck." He started with his eyes level with hers, and then it became like a roving monologue, and he moved past her, under the awning and along the walkway, until he got to the front door. _Suck_—it wasn't part of her usual vocabulary, but she remembered when they'd been standing there, shortly before their near-kiss, and he said it _sucked_. It does suck, she'd told him, and she smiled at the memory, because it was so supremely Karev.

He unlocked the door, and she followed him, not too close to suggest this was less a social call and more a booty call, and as he turned the doorknob, he looked at her and laughed and rolled his eyes and said, "Come on."

He opened the door for her and let her cross the threshold first, and she didn't know what she expected—the clinical starkness with which she'd always associated Ellis Grey, because this was her house before it was Meredith and Alex and Izzie's, or maybe a reckless disarray with which she associated Meredith Grey, a kind of frazzled disorganization. What she hadn't expected was the gentle warmth, the quiet and almost greedy way with which the home welcomed people in. This was a home more than a house, and Addison had spent her entire life living in houses, cold, unfeeling places without character or personality, and what could be said of Meredith Grey's house, whether Addison liked the person who informed it or not, was that it had charm, personality by the handfuls, _character_. It was the kind of place where people were supposed to settle down and raise families. Alex shut the door and then dropped his keys on the table by the door.

"Seventh circle of hell?" Addison asked him, and he rolled his shoulders.

"Just wait. You totally think they're normal, and then out of nowhere, bam, psychosis."

And yet, his tone of voice was affectionate. These people were his family, and Addison had to respect that. Mark, Derek, they were her family—Callie, Preston Burke, they were her family. It didn't mean she liked them all the time, and in true familial fashion, she usually didn't, but it meant that the hospital was the home where, when they went, they had to be taken in. She was struck by his tenderness for them, which he hid so expertly but that she could see because she recognized it in herself, and she was moved by his ability to care. He couldn't fake being a tough guy, but he couldn't quite keep the blanket of apathy over his feet.

"What is that look for?" he asked her, and his tone softened. The wash of his five o'clock shadow was painted thicker than usual over his face, which made him look older, hardened. He was so baby-faced, so textbook handsome, that the stubble roughened his edges like sandpaper. She arched her eyebrow and said nothing—he could draw his own conclusions, and his smile edged into a smirk and he said, "What was it you said about my room again?"

"I think I said I was going to lock you out."

"Yeah, is that so?" he said, and the remark felt strangely unrehearsed, so unlike a line, so blissfully genuine, and they were just kids again, fumbling for bra straps in the backs of their parents cars. There was no point to being suave or charming; they had seen each other in surgeries, broken down by the weight of other people's deaths, destroyed by the poignancy of an infant, crying for the mother it didn't even know yet. There was no point in trying to convince the other that they were people they weren't. Addison's entire dating career, pre-Derek, had been filled with the first-date façade, the slow unveiling of who she was so that the guy might take it in small bites. Alex knew all of the pieces, however broken. He knew about Derek and Mark; he knew about the baby. He knew how she handled a scalpel and that she bit back when bitten. He knew that her temper was nasty and her wrath worse. He knew all of those things, not from the awkward information-sharing of first dates, a passing back and forth of vital statistics as though they were the sum of a person, but instead from being there. The being there suddenly felt like all that mattered.

That was why when she opened her mouth, all she could summon was, "That's so."

When he moved forward to kiss her, it was without the prologues or the build-up or the lingering glances to which she'd grown accustomed, and it was a tender, tired kiss, the kind of late-night, just-before-bed kiss that she'd almost forgotten how to give. With her heels on, she was a little taller than he was, and when he pulled her to her, his hand pressed to the small of her back, the height difference was negligible. "You'll sleep in my bed?" he murmured against his mouth, as though she'd thought she'd be sleeping on the couch instead, and she started to laugh and pull away, and that was when the door opened.

Maybe it was that Alex had always been an expert on sneaking women into his house, long before they were even women and could still be classified as girls, and his hand moved to take hers and deftly started pulling her to the stairs. There was a sense that they weren't hiding so much as they were trying to keep their secret exactly that—a secret—because the second people knew about it, this, whatever it was, then came the need to _define_. People were never happy with 'we don't know, but we enjoy each other's company'. The admission to herself, however small, that the sneaking was about giving themselves some room to breathe and not embarrassment on anyone's side made her a little bolder.

Only it was Derek and Meredith, and their argument was quiet and restrained but obvious; they kept their voices down for whoever might be asleep upstairs, but it didn't occur to them that their audience would be at the foot of the stairs, ten feet away. "I think you're being ridiculous," Derek said to Meredith, and Meredith responded in kind, her voice shrill and high. Addison knew Derek's body language well enough to recognize his resignation, the preparation to lose the battle but win the war. Derek always won the war.

Alex had stopped a little ways up the flight of stairs, and Addison was stopped, finding bizarre fascination in it, the rubbernecking that was her life. She didn't get it. She had never gotten it, what the Meredith and Derek thing was. She had stopped comparing herself to Meredith Grey, but she couldn't help the morbid curiosity. "Derek, this is my _mom's_ house. I can't just—leave. It's like, this is what I have," Meredith was saying. Derek must have asked her to move in with him, into his little trailer in the woods, complete with poison oak plants and ants. Good, thought Addison—she can be the one to get poison oak in places poison oak should not be gotten, but her next thought was that it couldn't have been too far off from proposal. She didn't doubt that that day would come, but to have it so vivid in her imagination—well, that would make her Wife 1.0 and Meredith 2.0, and all Addison could feel about that was _displaced_.

"Hey," Alex said, and she looked to where he stood on the stairs, he, so effortlessly genuine and unmovable, as though he were the sort of man to leave his mark so indelibly on anyone—as though he would refuse to be washed off. His grin was lop-sided but reassuring, and he put out his hand, palm up, for her to take. And Addison said to herself, Well, _hell_, and she started up the stairs after him.

The noise of her heels against the wood was enough to alert Meredith and Derek to the audience, and it was Derek who looked to up and said, after a long, graceless silence, "Addison?"

There was no way out of that. She stopped on the stair and turned to look at the both of them—Derek, who looked amused, Meredith, who looked shocked—and she said, her words measured carefully, "Guilty as charged." Alex had already escaped to the upper floor, and when he heard her stop and then speak, he turned back.

"What are you doing here?" Derek asked, and his face was still the plaster of silent amusement. There was no good answer for that, she in her coat and high heels, sobered from the earlier drinking, and it was close 1AM, and all that aside, it was Meredith Grey's house, and she had no good excuse. She didn't even have anything she could make up.

It was Meredith who saved her from the burden of finding a reason, and she called, "Alex?" with a tone that said she wasn't entirely sure he'd respond. It was the only logical explanation Meredith could find, Addison was sure, and Addison looked to Alex, who shrugged, and then he came back down the stairs.

"Oh, Lucy," Derek said, laughter in his voice, "you got some 'splainin' to do."

No, Addison thought. No, I don't—as though they were guilty teenagers, sneaking in well after curfew, as though Derek had any space to say anything to her regarding her personal life and her personal dealings, and she started to say something they might both have regretted when Alex spoke first. "Dude, it's one o'clock in the morning. We can do the Days of Our Lives in the morning, but I'm exhausted, and we're going to sleep."

We. The use of the first-person plural. They had suddenly become a 'we'. Just as easily as he said it, he grabbed her hand and pulled her the rest of the way up the stairs. It was just that simple for him, and she realized it needed to be that simple for her too. She had to simplify, reduce it to its smallest parts, and then get rid of the unnecessary elements. That was something to do in the morning, along with talking to Mark—the mental housekeeping. For now, Alex was right. They needed sleep.

"Sorry about that," he said when they reached the top of the stairs, and he didn't let go of her hand as he lead her to his door. "I forgot that he pretty much lives here."

"If that's the worst of it, I can handle it," she said, and he looked at her for a second, a sideways glance that she couldn't interpret.

There was no way for Addison to be further out of her element. Life had not taught her to be adaptable; if anything, it had shown her how to be rigid and unyielding, and she excelled at both of those things, but in the moment of looking at his door with the University of Iowa bumper sticker taped to the wood she accepted that she still had a lot of growing to do. She had thought she was done, first with medical school, then with her residency, and once she got her private practice, her brownstone, her home in the Hamptons, and her perfect husband, she figured she had plateaued. That was it—who Addison Forbes Montgomery-Shepherd was had begun and stopped. There was nothing left to learn. But here she was, outside a younger man's door, finding out that she still had a lot of living to do.

"Hey, relax," he said, and she laughed. He opened the door, and his room was a wreck. He looked at her, apology in his eyes, and God, six months ago, this would have been it for her, the end of the proverbial line. She'd have been on her heel in a second, but there was something irresistible and sexy about a room that was lived in, not a room where someone came and pushed all of her dirty clothes into a corner, where room service was taken out after every meal, and her bed was always made. Alex's bed—unmade; his floor—covered in clothing; there were no tell-tale signs of room service trays, and that was just delicious to her. "Sorry," he said, shrugging, and she went ahead into the room, "I don't spend any time here. So when I do, it's just kind of—"

He stopped when she turned back to look at him, and maybe even in the darkness of his room he could see the flush that had risen to her cheeks. He shut the door behind him, and she stepped out of her heels; it was the first time, in the history of their _whatever_, that they'd been completely alone, and there was only the split second's hesitation, the indecisiveness of not knowing how to proceed, before the space between them became nonexistent. Their noses bumped painfully, but it was forgotten the moment his mouth met hers—not dead-on, they were too quick and involved to be careful about placement, and then it found its place. His mouth was warm, his tongue warmer, and neither of them seemed to know what to do with their hands, he fumbling to push her coat off her shoulders, she with her fingers on the buttons of his shirt. She had to let go of him to get her coat off, and once it was gone, his hands were on her back, pulling her as close as they could get, her hands crushed between them.

His "You taste like beer" disappeared into her "Shut up", both sets of words swallowed in each other's mouths, and his hands found their way to her ass with aggressive confidence. He didn't stop to ask, and she liked that, the way he had no doubt that she wanted him—and she made up her mind to give him everything he wanted, that night, the nights after, whether it was sex or a relationship or friendship, she'd give it all. His hands cupped her behind and then he pulled, forcing her to add the little jump to be in his arms, her legs wrapped around him. He supported her completely, one hand still on her ass, the other around her back, splayed between her shoulder blades, but the balance of weight was wrong, and he stumbled a little. He seemed not to know where to go, and she was too distracted by his mouth, wet and warm and tasting a little like the remnants of alcohol too, to help him with directions, and he started towards the bed but then changed his mind, turning to press her back against the door. Their combined weight hit loudly, but with the balance regained, he shifted to move the hand against her back, and he flattened it against the door, supporting himself. His other hand slipped to her stomach, to pull at the hem of her shirt, and she expected it to be difficult, but he was deft in pulling it up enough to tug it up over her breasts, and, with her help, over her head. She expected to feel exposed, but she felt overdressed instead, and he took the shirt from her and tossed it somewhere behind them.

It was then that his mouth moved to her neck, his stubble like a burn, but God, she'd take that, and her mouth mourned the warmth of his. She wanted his shirt off, but there was no room between them for the maneuvering of articles of clothing, and she couldn't remember how she had ever done this—for almost twelve years, she'd only slept with Mark and Derek, which made her nearly a virgin, and then—God, did they have protection? She sure as hell didn't, not that she'd ever been one to carry around condoms in her wallet, and—his mouth found a sensitive spot on her neck and she gasped, in spite of herself, and he laughed into her skin, amused by her reaction and clearly determined to elicit it again—she was on birth control, as a matter of course, but they needed condoms too, and he had to have condoms. The train of thought lead to the next logical thing, which was hygiene, and she had never understood why women excused themselves to the bathroom to freshen up, but she suddenly found it vital.

"Karev," she murmured, force of habit, and she refused to correct herself, hoping she could pass it off as a term of endearment, and he looked up at her, his gaze heavy-lidded. With her legs still around him, it was hard to tell him that she had to disentangle herself, but it was now or never, and she said, "Bathroom?"

"Christ, woman," he said, exhaling loudly and leaning forward to press his face against her neck. His breath was hot, the skin of her neck a little stung from the rug burn of his facial hair, and he seemed reluctant to let her down, but he said, "Down the hall to the right."

Slowly he released her, and he exhaled again and rubbed the back of his neck. "If you need a toothbrush or—whatever, mine's the green one." He looked around on the floor for something, maybe her shirt, but it was too dark to see the differences between piles of clothing, and he picked up the closest thing, a too-big Iowa t-shirt, but she pulled it over her head. "Go Hawkeyes," he said, and he opened the door for her.

The light in the hallway was intense, and he left the door slightly ajar behind her. To the right, she rehashed the directions. There was a necessary moment for regaining her bearings, a few deep breaths to regulate her heart rate, and then, barefoot and wearing Alex's t-shirt, she went down the hall to the bathroom. The door was open, the lights off, and she stepped inside and switched on the light. In the mirror she looked younger than she remembered herself having looked in a while, but she spent so little time lately looking into mirrors. The hospital made her tired and older, and life had substantially aged her over the last few months. And yet, there she was, bearing little resemblance to the Addison she'd grown so accustomed to, but she liked this Addison, the one with the hint of the smile, the flush in her cheeks, her hair in disarray, her neck a little red from the attention. This was Addison finally getting her groove back.

The best part was, Alex was not entirely responsible. He was a trigger, a reminder that she still had so much to offer. She was a woman, damn it, and an attractive one at that. What was it Callie had said a few months ago—you haven't 'ended up' anywhere. For the first time in ages, she could honestly say that was true.

The green toothbrush sat on the counter next to a tube of toothpaste, and she turned on the water and weighed the meaning behind his letting her borrow the brush. It was oddly intimate, but it was a hung jury on whether or not it was significant. When the door opened, and it was Derek, only in his boxers, the toothbrush was already in her mouth, the faucet running, and he said nothing to her at first. They made eye contact in the mirror, and he bumped her hip with his to get her to move aside and allow him some room. He washed his hands, keeping his eyes on hers, and his grin was unmistakable. It was also predictable, and he would continue to grin until she asked him what he was grinning about. She was going to make him wait for the payoff, and she took her sweet time.

Derek reached across her for a different toothbrush, his eyes never moving from hers, and finally she withdrew the brush from her mouth and, foam dribbling down her chin, asked, "What?"

"I just think it's funny, Addison," he said, his tone blithe and oddly condescending at the same time. "Alex Karev? Seriously?"

She could recall every single moment of her life in which Derek had come to her, asking for an explanation. They came in vivid detail, no fuzziness about the specifics, and she could remember every moment where he'd been disappointed in her. This was not one of those times, and it left open the possibility that maybe he was a little bit happy for her. Maybe he could see that she was a little bit happy for herself.

And then he opened his mouth again. "You don't think that might be a little bit of a bad idea?"

"Oh, that's rich coming from you." She leaned over to spit out some of the toothpastey water, which might have been indelicate in front of anyone other than the man she'd been married to for more than a decade. "Why is it, exactly, that I'm the only one who is supposed to feel in some way guilty for having something going on with an intern? Explain that to me."

Derek laughed, which had always been his coping mechanism in confrontational situations, and he stuck the toothbrush in his mouth and said, the brush obscuring his words but not beyond recognition, "I'm just trying to think about what's best for you."

"Bull_shit_," was her quick response. This was the value of being as comfortable with someone as she was with Derek—there was no censoring, no biting back of her words. They were almost siblings in that sense, and, like siblings, they were allowed to dislike each other.

He laughed and brushed his teeth a little more, and she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand and then immersed her fists into the water. "Oh, wait," he said, and then he withdrew the brush. "This doesn't have to do with me, does it?"

She had heard some arrogant lines in her life, and most of them came from Mark. Precious few ever came from Derek, but at his heart of hearts, he was a man, and on occasion, he came up with gems such as that one. She stared at him in the mirror, and then she picked up the tube of toothpaste, leaned over, and squeezed it onto his cheek. It came out in thick globs, only some of it sticking to his skin, the rest falling down to his shoulder. "Sometimes," she said, still wielding the toothpaste like it was a deadly weapon, "you are the most ridiculous person I've ever met."

He laughed and put his hand to his cheek to wipe the toothpaste away, and he said, "You could have just said 'no'."

She screwed the top back onto the toothpaste and watched in the mirror as Derek shook his hand to get the paste off of it, and they met eyes again. They'd been good together, once upon a time, but that was it exactly—once upon a time. It was a time she could hardly remember, the fights replacing the good memories, but they had been Derek-and-Addison once, and maybe they could be again. Friends. A good team. People who care about each other. She still didn't believe for a minute that he was just thinking about what was best for her, and she shut the water off and said, "Goodnight, Derek."

"Goodnight, you hussy," he said after her, laughing.

She went back to Alex's room quietly, and she slipped in the door. A lamp in the corner was on, not enough light to illuminate the whole room, but enough to show off the fact that he'd changed—into just a pair of pajama pants, which made her job so much easier. She was happy to stand by the door and watch him—the scrubs did him no justice, and the last time she'd properly fantasized about him with his shirt off was when he'd been in just that black tank top, she with a mask pressed to her mouth. She had blamed it on the pure oxygen, but she had to admit, his body was good-looking. He wasn't cut like Mark, but Mark always struck her a little bit as a Ken doll. Alex was a guy she could sink her teeth into.

He'd taken her absence to clear off the bed, and in her new level of clarity, aided by the reality shock of Derek, she said, "Alright, there's no sexy way to ask this. Do you have a condom?"

His laugh was half-cough, half-chuckle, and he straightened up from where he stood next to his bed and said, "Yeah, of course."

"That 'of course' wasn't really necessary," she said. "I don't need to think about how many other women have been in here recently."

He crossed his arms over his chest, and for a second she was worried he might be angry with her, but she was feeling strangely candid, and he could either choose to deal with it or not. "What, you jealous?" he asked, and there was that Alex Karev grin she was really getting used to. "Don't worry, there have only been two since I moved in."

"I'm not so sure you need to make it three then," she teased, but she was being serious too. Two—since he'd moved in, which couldn't have been that long ago, and it was probably longer ago than that that she'd made that stupid bargain with Mark. Quick math told her that Alex was a little bit more of a playboy than she'd signed up for, and then he laughed.

He held up one finger and said, "Grey." And then a second finger and, "Izzie. And trust me, there was no sex involved. So stop looking at me like that."

She hadn't even realized she'd felt jealousy until he assured her there was nothing to be jealous of, and God, jealousy, what a terrible emotion, but it felt so absolutely healthy, like she had a sex drive and a heart that was _thriving_, not just withering away. He gave her an up-nod, her sign to come to him, and he was on the other side of the bed, so she went to the bed and put one knee and then the other on top of it. He watched her and grunted somewhere back in his throat, and it sounded a little like it was involuntary. She wasn't the only one who could be so affected.

He got onto the bed too, stationary for a moment on both of his knees, and then he moved towards her. He didn't reach for her until they were only a few inches apart, and then his hand was at her waist, underneath his t-shirt, his fingers against her bare skin. She went to take it off, and he stopped her and said, "No, leave this on. I like the way you look in it."

From anyone else, it might have been a line. From Alex, it was the most natural thing to say. It was strange with the lights on, their quiet and unintentional foreplay, because they could see each other. His face had become a stranger's face to her, not the Alex Karev she knew as an intern but instead the Alex Karev whose hands had been on her ass, whose mouth had been on her neck, and it was the disassociation that kept her from being embarrassed when he pulled the hem of the shirt up to expose the waistband of her jeans. He unbuttoned them, and then he unzipped them slowly enough that she could protest if she wanted to, but she couldn't see that happening any time soon.

Their positioning made it impossible for him to do anything other than push her jeans off of her hips, and Addison had forgotten that she wasn't wearing sexy underwear, that she always opted for a pair of white Hanes-her-way briefs when she was working, but Alex didn't seem to mind that there was no lacy black thong underneath her clothes. He pushed her jeans down her upper thighs, enough so that when his hand worked its way around to cup her ass, there was just the one layer of clothing between them. His move shoved her hips towards him, and she wanted to kiss him, but he seemed to be lingering just beyond her reach. It was grotesque, the way he knew how to work her, but her old instinct kicked in like muscle memory, and when she pushed him back, he let her.

The mechanics of it were awkward, but God, Addison thought, sex was awkward in general, and he landed on his back, adjusting himself so that she could sit easily on his hips, her legs straddling him. If she thought about it too long, she might start to get self-conscious, so she wouldn't allow herself to overthink this, no matter how much of a self-defeating overthinker that therapist had told her she was. She leaned down to kiss Alex's neck, and he wasn't going to let her be on top for too long, and with his hand pressed to the small of her back to steady them, he forced them both over so that she was on her back again.

That was when the fumbling over her jeans began, he struggling to push them off without having to move from on top of her, and finally, hands and feet all awkwardly involved, she was free of her jeans and his hand moved to her thigh. His tongue wet his lips, and she watched his mouth, and his eyes moved to her mouth. His hand slid to the small of her back and then lower, dipping under her waistband, and she moved her legs so that he was well and good between them, and she thought, Wow, we are absolutely, shamelessly going to do this—

And then there was the knock at the door accompanied by the thinness of a voice saying, "Alex?"

"Oh my fucking Jesus Christ," Alex muttered, burying his face in Addison's neck, and he leaned over to switch the lamp off, and, maybe in a habit left over from his teen years, pulled the rumpled comforter up and over them.

"Alex, are you still awake?"

The voice was unmistakably Izzie Stevens', the tone unmistakably whiny, and Addison was unmistakably frustrated. Judging from the slight rock of Alex's hips against hers, he was frustrated too. Maybe, if they were quiet enough, Stevens would disappear and they could carry on, as they were, and Addison would get laid sometime in the near future. The delicious thought that hit her was that they should just go for it with Izzie standing outside the door, trying not to creak the bedsprings, but they were functioning adults, and functioning adults sometimes lived in houses with other functioning adults, and Stevens could deal. Addison rocked her hips up and toward Alex, who responded by muffling whatever noise he was going to make in the sheets beside her head, and Izzie Stevens knocked on the door again.

"Alex, I really have to talk to you. It's really important."

"Don't come in here, Izzie, I'm trying to sleep," he called to her, his voice—and Addison noted this with pride—a little strangled and hoarse.

"You're totally masturbating, aren't you? I don't care, I'm coming in."

There was no way she would actually do it, Addison thought—and then the door opened and closed again, and at least Stevens was polite enough to give Alex the darkness he needed for masturbation or sleep or whatever it was he might actually have been doing, and Alex pressed his face into Addison's shoulder. It was almost as in flagrante as they were going to get without actual penetration, and the bed heaved beside them as Izzie sat down.

It was one of the more ridiculous situations Addison had been involved with in recent memory. The number one most ridiculous had been Derek walking in on her and Mark, the second was Derek coming to her hotel room and Mark stepping out of the shower, but she and Alex had just cracked the top three. They were uncleverly hidden underneath his comforter, but if Izzie took half a second to pay attention to something outside of herself, she would notice that there was something very strange about the situation at hand.

Fortunately for them, Izzie could be counted on to be primarily me-me-me.

"Izzie, go away," Alex said, and he kissed Addison quickly on the mouth, which struck her as both endearing and hysterical, but she was going to play along as long as he was so determined to.

"Just do whatever … whatever you were doing, my back is to you," Izzie said, and Alex had to bury his face in Addison's neck to smother his laughter, and his whole body shook with the restraint. "I mean, don't masturbate. Seriously. Because I could never sit down to a table with you after that. And besides, ew. Couldn't you just find someone to sleep with? I'm sure Olivia's available."

"I'm not masturbating," he clarified for her, and Addison suddenly felt a hand on her leg through the blanket, a kind of reassuring pat.

"Thank God," Izzie said. "I'm still not turning towards you. I don't trust you."

"Dude, tell me what the hell your deal is and then get out of here." Addison wanted to tell Alex that Izzie was groping her, but there was no good way to go about it, and, she decided, it might just make this particular position, he still between her legs, all the more frustrating for him. "I'm trying to sleep."

"Oh, _sure_ you were."

"Iz."

"Okay, fine. So I started seeing this new guy, right? And he's a total jackass. I mean, just a real asshole. And normally I don't like assholes. I liked you, but that was until you became an asshole. Anyway, so he's an asshole, but whenever I get around him, I just can't control myself. And Denny was so totally different, you know? But I don't know, this guy." Izzie's hand squeezed Addison's leg. This must have been how things were with O'Malley, Addison decided, but that didn't make things any less bizarre for her.

Alex said nothing, and Addison didn't blame him.

"You should find a girl, Alex," Izzie went on, and it was then that Alex kissed Addison's neck, as though to reassure her that he had not forgotten that he was between her legs. "I mean, clearly you and I are not going to happen ever again, but you should find a nice, steady, quiet girl. And what is this Dr. Montgomery stuff? Seriously, isn't she a little old for you?"

_Well_. "Shut up, Iz," Alex said, and Addison regarded those as fighting words.

She was about to pull the covers off from over her head when Izzie shifted her weight on the bed and said, "Could I just sleep in here with you tonight? George and I used to do it all the time."

That left her with no choice. She pushed the covers aside, kicked Izzie's hand away from her leg, and Alex rolled off of Addison onto his back, and covered his face with his crooked arm, waiting for the nuclear fallout. "No, Stevens, you may not," Addison said, and Izzie sprang up from the bed.

Her physical reaction was difficult to gauge in the darkness, but her vocal one was not. "Oh my God, Alex. Seriously? _Seriously_?" Then she seemed to be rendered speechless, and she turned and left the room in a hurry, the door opening with force and closing with even more.

Addison was still stuck on old. It was then that she remembered the way Izzie had been treating Callie, who was Addison's one friend, and that made her even angrier. Alex, next to her, said, "Dude, seventh level of hell."

"You have not seen seventh level of hell," she replied, and she got up off of the bed. Foregoing pants—she was an adult, for Christ's sake—and avoiding Alex's turn and grab for her, she left the room, and managed to catch Stevens before she started down the stairs. She didn't need to call to get the girl's attention; the opening of the door was enough to do it.

"Alex, I am so—" she started to say, turning around and cupping her hand over her eye, as though afraid to see whatever might have come out of the room.

Addison crossed her arms over her chest. Alex's shirt was long enough to make her not totally indecent, and Addison could feel the bitch in her ready for a fight. "Do you have a problem with me, Stevens?"

The younger girl's expression hardened, and she crossed her arms over her chest too, and she said, "What is this, Dr. Montgomery? Are you slumming?"

She wasn't sure what made her angrier—the slumming, the old, or the entire situation. And then she decided; what it was, what it had always been that made her so angry about Izzie Stevens, was her attitude, her lack of respect, her sheer disregard for her schooling and her talent, and now she could add to the list disrespecting her own friends.

"My personal life isn't any of your business. Neither is his personal life. And for that matter—neither is George O'Malley's personal life. Which means that you need to grow the hell up."

Once upon a time, Addison had been almost prepared to be friends with Izzie Stevens. And now, standing in Meredith Grey's hallway, she could see what Richard meant when he said they were similar—but she could also see the things that made them different. Respect, for one. And Izzie had not yet learned how to get back up without holding onto other people's hands. The trick to overcoming was doing it all alone, rain or shine. It took Addison a long time to get there. Izzie still had the entire battle to do.

For a second, she looked like she had a retort, but all that was left was name-calling, the brutal criss-cross pattern of women's fights with each other, and it was 2AM. Everyone was tired. Everyone worked hard. And Addison felt bad for yelling at her, for the strength of her words, but that was all there was to say. She had laid it out. Izzie could take it or leave it.

She left it. She stayed silent but looked stung, and she turned and walked back down the stairs and out the front door. Addison couldn't make herself feel horrible for standing up for herself, and maybe that was a lesson Izzie Stevens had to learn too.

That had to be it, the last of the interruptions for the night, and when she went back to Alex's room, she was feeling sapped of energy, exhausted, ready to go to bed—except that there was a cute intern in that bed waiting for her. She climbed into bed with him, wrapped her arm around his waist and leaned in to kiss his neck.

His only response was a soft snore, and that was just _perfec_t.

To be continued.


	8. I Thought You Were My Boyfriend

**Viscosity**

_Summary: _In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post Some Kind of Miracle and for the rest of the season.

_Rating:_ T.

_Author's note: _Thank you for your patience, everyone. I'm still without internet, but I promised chapter 8, so here I am. Oh, and don't stress about this chapter. It's mostly transitional, setting the groundwork for some later chapters. I promise there's a happily ever after. And on another note, I actually love Izzie, it's just hard to tell through Addison's eyes.

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**Chapter 8: I Thought You Were My Boyfriend**

There was a time, pre-MD after her name, when she used a regular alarm clock to control her morning movements, and when her pager beeped loudly, it resounding urgent, and the man whose arm was around her waist said, "Izzatyourpagerormine," she thought for a terrifying second that time had taken her back to her bed with Derek, her life in New York, and the confusion over who it was the hospital desperately needed. And then the man groaned and half-bit her shoulder, a move infinitely more playful than Derek had ever been at 5AM, and she remembered her time and place, the here-and-now of Alex Karev's bed, Meredith Grey's house, and a city three thousand miles away from New York. She expected to be panicked, and certainly that was the dialogue she'd had with herself the night before—that she'd regret it come morning but that there was no polite way to leave, not even a note on the pillow—but panic was a long way off, maybe even as far as those three thousand miles, and what she felt instead was annoyance, frustration, and an overactive sex drive that was still dying to be satiated but would have to wait, judging on the SOS call from the hospital.

The sheets were a wreck between her legs, and Alex was the one who forced himself out of bed before she did and turned on the lamp on the bedside table, and she watched his back, the movement of his muscles under his skin as though he were an Anatomy 101 introduction video. "It was mine," she said, forcing a yawn into her hand, "my pager. Go back to sleep."

She watched the shrug, the intricate tug of one muscle on another to make the move happen, and he had a mole just under his shoulder blade, small, but it wasn't something she could have or would have noticed in the darkness of last night, both of them preoccupied with the baser actions than with the tiny marks that made their skin different from anyone else's. It wasn't a time to get romantic. He looked over his shoulder at her, and he leaned back to slide his hand down her knee to her sheet-covered thigh, and she propped herself up on her elbows and met his eyes. "I should be getting up anyway if I want to get any hot water," he said. "You going back to the hotel, or …"

She didn't know how free she was to interpret the trailing off, but when he raised his eyebrows in a way that was almost salacious and was definitely suggestive, she knew he was giving her the reins. And there was nothing in the world that sounded better than a shower with him—but the beeping of the pager had been Pavlovian, and her reaction was professional, which meant she couldn't behave unprofessionally. If she joined him, only God knew how long they'd be in there, and she had a hospital to go to, lives to save, surgeries to perform, and there was a pang of guilt as she looked at his eye, the burst capillaries under the skin. She knew it was going to look worse in the morning, the pain less but the cosmetic effect greater, and she hated that she had in some way been the cause of it. He had yet to tell her what actually happened, and it wasn't as though she and Mark had sat down to have a civil conversation quite yet, but her imagination was more than enough to fill in those blanks. Worst of all, she was his teacher, and if their feelings for one another were going to get in the way—as they already had—of someone's ability to do medicine, well, then they had to reconsider what they were doing. The feelings wouldn't go away, but the misconduct could, and Alex's hand wandered down her leg to her stomach, and he poked her hard in the hip.

"Stop it," he said, adjusting himself so he could lean in a little closer. "Stop making that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you're thinking too much. Knock it off. It's too early. Just say you're not going back to your hotel because you really want to help me make sure I get all the shampoo out. It's seriously that easy."

She couldn't help laughing, and it was nice, the way he cut through the forest of her complicated mental process and laid it out like a PowerPoint presentation—easy to read, well organized, and colorful, and complete with sound effects. "Your bruise looks worse," she said, incapable of properly answering him. "I'm sorry about that."

He shook his head to keep her from touching it, and he said, "What're you sorry for? You didn't punch me."

"I know, but—"

"Dude, and you're not responsible for Sloan." He was so honest and intense and serious about it, his hair a little mussed from the sleep, his lids still heavy, and the bruise under his eye made him look more boyish somehow, more rough-and-tumble and ready for the fight. He rested his chin on her knee and they watched each other for a second before he said, "You don't regret coming over here, do you?"

"No," she said, and that answer was one of the easiest ones she'd made—and it was made easier by the grin he tried to suppress, the sloppy half-smile of his that seemed both so natural and so timid.

He leaned further into her, his free hand moving to the spot on the bed beside her hip to support his weight, and when he kissed her, they both laughed, interrupted by the unpleasantness of each other's morning breath. "Go brush your teeth," she said with a laugh, pushing him away a little, and he pretended to bite at her nose and countered, "You could use some mouthwash yourself, woman."

…

Coming down to Meredith Grey's dining table in the clothing she wore the night before, minus the shirt, which was nicely folded and pressed into her purse, felt a little like a walk of shame, and Addison couldn't have been more pleased. It was a long time since she'd been in the position to be ashamed of herself, and now that she was finally there, she didn't feel an ounce of it. The University of Iowa shirt, her hair unwashed and disheveled, maybe a little flush in her cheeks from the positive attention—and it was Derek who greeted her at the front table, the newspaper tucked under his arm. He reached into the cabinet for his cereal—Muesli, she was sure, because some things never changed—and when he heard her, he turned to look at her and grinned.

"That can't be today's paper," Addison said, stopping to slide her heels on. "It's too early for today's paper."

"Yesterday's," he said, and he went to the next cabinet to retrieve a bowl, and he did it with the fluency of a man who knew exactly where all the dishes were. "Yesterday's. I like to pretend it's the current news." There was a grin he tossed her way, and then he quickly prepared himself a bowl and added, "Too bad the horoscopes are a day late."

The déjà vu was intense, if only for a moment, but she was no longer wistful for the time when they were together like this, getting dressed and eating breakfast in the dark. "Did you get the same page I did?" she asked, breaking the moment, and she steadied herself against the doorframe as she put on her other heel.

"Brachial plexus palsy?" he said, going to the refrigerator for the milk and pouring it on with the efficiency of a man who had done this quite a few times before too, and he bumped the fridge shut with his hip.

"That's the one."

"Do you need a ride—" he started to ask, and they were both interrupted by a thumping down the stairs, the slow, exaggerated walk of someone not prepared to be awake quite yet. Addison leaned back to look up the stairs, and it was Meredith Grey, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

"Dr. Montgomery," Meredith grunted, passing by her to go into the kitchen. Derek stopped her to give her a quick kiss, but Meredith was having none of it, still too groggy to deal with Derek's sloppy affections. "This is weird," she said, and when she opened the fridge to look for something to eat, the light from it was the only bright spot in an otherwise dark room. "I mean, this is weird, right? I haven't stepped into some weird Twilight Zone where it's totally normal for my boyfriend and his ex-wife to all be eating breakfast together?"

"No, it's weird," Derek and Addison agreed, their voices overlapping in the perfect unison that had defined Derek-and-Addison.

"That's a little bit weirder," she said, and she straightened up. Addison couldn't help the thought that asked if Meredith ever suffered from the looming of Addison's shadow, the way Addison had the other way around. Derek wasn't one to make the comparison so obvious, but Meredith might have been the kind of person to imagine things larger than they were—just like Addison could be, from time to time. Meredith had never had anything to worry about, and Addison thought that one day she should tell her that. Tell her when she was lucid, when it was information she could take with her to the bank, the altar, or the grave, whichever made her happier. "Why are you two up so early?" Meredith asked, forcing her yawn back into her mouth and letting the refrigerator close, the light disappearing with it.

"Surgery," Derek said, and in the half-darkness he and his cereal crunched.

"If I were more awake, I'd ask if I could come scrub in, but I'm not. Someone put the coffee on before Izzie gets up." It was more of a suggestion than anything, and Meredith was the one who took it from herself, going to the cabinet to pull out the container of coffee, and it was Addison with the initiative to lean over and flip on the lights.

Meredith grimaced, and Addison laughed and said, "Sorry, I just thought it compounded the strangeness to be standing around in the dark."

Once the coffee preparations were done, Meredith slumped at the table, an uncaffeinated mess, which didn't seem to phase Derek in the slightest, who blithely finished his cereal, cleaned his bowl, and then bent to kiss Meredith on the cheek. She was only slightly more receptive than she had been. Addison checked the time and said, "Derek, we really should get going." There was more to the spoken 'we' than what she said, an implied sense of teamwork that she hoped didn't threaten Meredith, but Meredith should have known better than to be threatened by Addison. Her threatening days, as far as Derek Shepherd went, were over.

"We should, before the second round of pages begin."

Derek and Meredith shared a lingering touch, the intimate and casual morning-before-work touch of people in love, and Addison watched them, twingeless. There was the sound of a door slamming from upstairs, but both Derek and Meredith seemed unaffected by it, as though that was a regular occurrence in the house, and then the slam was followed closely by the shrill yell of one Izzie Stevens: "This house is a den of hedonism!"

There was another door slam, like a symphony of anger. Derek chuckled and escorted Addison out of the kitchen and back to the front door, where only hours before they'd been mutually caught. She thought to go back to say goodbye to Alex, but it seemed likely he was part of the hailstorm going on upstairs, and as Derek and Addison started to go out the door, it was Alex's voice that stopped them.

She turned back, and there he was, freshly showered and shaven—and God, if she couldn't help thinking of wanting to do that herself—his hair tucked under a navy blue knit hat, his skin looking too tan for Seattle weather, too tan for Iowa weather too, like he came from a good Greek stock, and she made the note to herself to ask him where his family came from, what kind of name Karev was, all of the details that made him _him_, and that was when Derek nudged her and jangled his keys. "I'll be out by the car. Just don't take too long."

She looked at him, surprised by the action but not by his understanding, and she said, "No, it's fine, we've got to get going."

Derek looked at her, the unspoken 'I know you better than that' dangling around the corners of his mouth, and he opened the door and shut it behind him. That left her alone with Alex, and Meredith Grey was right—what kind of world had it turned into where she was spending time, however short, with her ex-husband's girlfriend and her ex-husband was helping her out with the men in her life? It was possible her instinct from the night before had been right; maybe Derek had found it in himself to be a little happy for her.

Alex nodded his head in the direction of the living room just off of the foyer, and Addison followed him with hesitation, wondering if there was a stern talk in her future, if Izzie had managed to, in the course of ten minutes, talk him into dropping Addison while the dropping was good. That tiny breath of insecurity was gone in a heartbeat as he, once they were secure behind the cover of wall, pushed her back against it and kissed her once, properly, on the mouth. It had the flair and intensity of something secret and forbidden, but it was neither of those things, and Addison realized she'd been mistaking the thrill of starting something new and good for something bad and wrong, because that was what she'd known for so long. When he pulled back to look at her, it didn't matter that she hadn't showered or put on her makeup and just barely slapped a toothbrush in her mouth, because it didn't seem to matter to him, just like it hadn't mattered to Derek about Meredith, and when he said, "Are you going to wear my shirt to Grace?" it wasn't with disapproval, and Addison wondered if maybe they weren't in a relationship already, whether the word had been said or not.

"I was going to. Do you have a problem with that?" she asked, her voice teasing and firmly, calmly in control, and he knew it.

"No, I like it. It kind of makes me feel like the Alpha Male. Even if I'm the only one who knows about it."

You could tell people, she wanted to tell him. It didn't have to be that they were the only people who knew about it. But to suggest that and have no idea where his mind was—she could safely assume it was on her, but whether his sway was of the more settled down variety, she didn't know—could prove to be humiliating, and it was definitely too early in the morning for the starts and stops of awkward conversation. "I really have to get going," was what she said in the absence of something clever or sexy, and when they kissed each other again, this time to say goodbye for the day, his hand rested along the ridge of her jaw, his thumb fitting perfectly into the space biology had created.

…

It had always been true in Addison's experience that hospital surgeons never wandered too far away from their home base, whichever hospital held them within its gravitational pull. Private practice surgeons, those in it primarily for the money—which once upon a time had been Derek and Mark and Addison herself—stuck with the practice. They worked their forty hours a week, some odd weekends to do specialized surgeries, and then they went on their vacations to the Hamptons or the Bahamas. It was the hospital surgeons who couldn't escape and even when they did, they found they didn't want to, and this was Addison's best guess why, when she stopped to look at the surgical board, she was quickly accompanied by Preston Burke, who dryly pointed out that it wasn't like he was going to go play golf, and Mark, who crossed his arms over his chest and said that he hated the rain.

It wasn't perfect, but it was family. Derek and Addison had completed their surgery with success, and Addison went to erase it from the board, taking great satisfaction in the whiteness of its removal. The board was a grandiose to-do list, and each successive item was another large task, each successive erasure the task completed. New York had its share of brilliant doctors, but Addison had to concede that Seattle Grace was home to some of the best in the country.

"Is it me, or is it a little quiet?" Addison said, joining the men in their line of grim board-observation, her arms crossed over her chest in a mirror of theirs.

"Ad, don't say that," Mark said. She'd hardly paid attention to the bruise on the side of Mark's face, notably worse than Alex's, and she thought with smug satisfaction that he deserved that, and the accompanying thought was that she couldn't let Alex get angry on her behalf again. That was the sort of thing that could damage his entire career, and as his teacher, she wasn't going to let that happen. He had too much talent to let it waste on petty fights with his attendings.

And it was strange to her how they could be avoiding each other, intent to ignore the problems at hand—the impending end of their silly agreement, the problem of Alex Karev, the inherent obstacle that was Mark and Addison. Alex was not the barrier between Addison and Mark. She liked to believe that it was not true that if it weren't for Alex she'd have gone right back to Mark, to the same old games, the coy routine of surgeon-vs.-surgeon. As much as she believed it, however, she knew it wouldn't change Mark's perception. Very little ever did.

His pager beeping rescued them from the silence, and when he was gone, off to respond to it, Preston cleared his throat and said, "There's a rumor going around."

She'd had enough of rumors for a year. It hadn't taken long at all for her unrelationship with Alex to circulate the halls of Seattle Grace, but very little did. After all, it hadn't taken much time for Richard to call her about Meredith and Derek, and everyone knew about Meredith and Derek at the Prom, whether they spoke a word of it or not. Everything was obvious to everyone else at Grace, but Addison's business was Addison's business was Addison's business—except that there was enough quiet strength and maturity to Preston Burke that she somehow didn't mind what he knew or that he was asking.

"Which one is that exactly?"

"I heard," he said, his voice just as measured and calm as always, "that you're planning a transfer to Mercy West."

_Well_. That was a rumor she'd have to sit up and pay attention to. Richard was the only one to hear of her potential plans to leave—and they were just that, _potential_. There were so many factors involved, and while Mercy West was on her short list, it was hardly her first choice. The invalidity of the rumor got her far less than the fact that the rumor existed at all. It shouldn't have existed. It wasn't something people should know, certainly not before it was confirmed, not before she had the chance to tell the people who might be angry with her about it. And then—to hell with it. People could think what they wanted.

"That is not entirely true," Addison told him, turning back to look at the board.

"Then what is?" he asked, and she could feel the weight of his eyes on her—that was not something that had ever occurred to her before she met Preston Burke, heavy gazes, the weight of him watching her.

There was a night a while back, when she and Derek were still together, or together again, and he came home and said, I don't think Preston Burke makes friends with anyone, and with this in mind she asked Preston, "Are we friends? You and I, are we friends."

The tone of his expression changed to that of silent appraisal, and they made eye contact, his eyes slightly narrowed, and he said, "Yes, Addison. We are friends."

They were two jungle animals, sizing each other up and determining the other an able adversary, and Addison was alright with that comparison. Preston Burke was the best, and if he deemed her suitable, well, she supposed she could deal with that. And if they were friends, just like she and Callie were friends, then he deserved to know. "I am considering it. Mercy West is offering me a lot of money. So are a couple of other places. I am … considering it. But no more seriously than I was six months ago."

"What about a month ago?"

It was a strange question, but maybe Addison gave him less credit than he deserved. Maybe he was a much more observant person. "A month ago," she said, and she weighed her words, "I was considering it a little more than I am today."

"And why is that?"

"On occasion," she said, her eyes scanning the board one last time, her hands going to her scrub cap to adjust the fit of it over her brow, "someone comes into the OR who changes your mind about things. So you cancel your surgeries, you rearrange. You put some things off. You know what I mean?"

His lips pursed and then moved into the Preston Burke smirk she recognized, and he said, "Well. I did propose, didn't I?"

…

"Dr. Montgomery," Miranda said—Dr. Bailey, Addison corrected her thought process, because when they were walking around those halls at Seattle Grace, she was Dr. Montgomery, and Miranda was Dr. Bailey, and Mark was Dr. Sloan, and that was how it was—as she stopped at the main surgical admitting desk. "Would you please take one of them off of my hands? They've been causing nothing but trouble, and it's interfering with my natural good mood."

By them she meant the surgical interns, who had taken seats in the waiting area, every last one of them, and Addison watched them with the calm amusement that came from remembering the night before. It was strange, unsteady ground they were all on, as though they'd all been forced through a torturous game of truth-or-dare and were now exposed to the toxin of each other's secrets. Everyone knew things about the others that they were better off not knowing, and someone, _anyone_, should have told them the dangers of living together. It was possible only Cristina Yang was spared, but then again, she belonged to the dismal club of interns sleeping with attendings. It was only Izzie Stevens who'd managed to stay out of that harm's way.

And Addison had her choice of them—Alex, _Dr. Karev_, but then she risked the accusations of favoritism; George, _Dr. O'Malley_, but she had little to say to him and not much more that she felt she could teach him; Cristina, _Dr. Yang_, but Addison was always struck by Yang's imperviousness to teaching; Meredith, _Dr. Grey_, but those silences were too stilted and long, driven onward by a lack of desire to dish about the man they'd both slept with; and last, Izzie, _Dr. Stevens_, and in spite of last night's entertainment, Addison couldn't think of a single decent reason why she shouldn't take Stevens under her wing, at least for the day.

Addison quickly reviewed the last of her patient's chart from the morning, and then she shut the chart and said, "Dr. Stevens. I'll take Dr. Stevens."

Bailey looked relieved, and Addison couldn't help wondering if part of the trouble she spoke of was between Alex and Stevens, if they were rubbing elbows too harshly in the glare of the light of the morning after, but that sounded like Stevens' problem more than it was Addison's. "Dr. Stevens," Bailey yelled across the waiting area, and Stevens bounced up, always impossibly ready to do work, and even if Addison didn't like the way she handled herself personally, she couldn't complain about her professional behavior.

Denny Duquette excepted. But everyone had their exceptions.

"Yes, Dr. Bailey?" Stevens said when she got close enough to them, and to her credit, she didn't so much as blink in Addison's direction.

"You're with Dr. Montgomery for the day, Stevens."

That was when Stevens stopped to look at Addison, and her expression was not unkind so much as it was uninspired, and there could be no doubting that she knew that Addison requested her specifically. Addison was sure Stevens imagined that Addison had done it to make her life hell, but the opposite was true. Addison had something to prove, however immaterial it was. She wanted to prove that she could conduct her personal life separately from her professional one. That was the lesson. "Oh, but I thought I'd come and help you with the—"

"With Dr. Montgomery, Dr. Stevens," Bailey said, and it was with an expression that seemed to personify her Nazi nickname, and when that left no room for argument, she turned back to look at the other interns and called, "The rest of you, up. Nobody better be thinking they're getting a spring break in _my_ hospital."

The other interns quickly followed her orders, and it was in passing that Addison met Alex's eyes, his smirk mostly hidden but recognizable to her. She liked that, that she was beginning to be able to see the tiny glances her way, the imperceptible changes in the way his mouth moved that connoted amusement or boredom or a 'hey you' stolen in the middle of a crazy workday. And when they were gone, Addison looked at Stevens, who had the good sense to appear to be a mixture between scared and annoyed, and Addison said, "Well, let's go."

"Wait—really?"

"Really what?" Addison said, and she started moving in the direction of the elevator to go back up to the NICU, regardless of whether Stevens was coming or not.

"You really want me to come with you? That wasn't a joke?"

"Dr. Stevens, I feel like we've had this conversation before," Addison said, and she hit the button on the elevator, and a few seconds later, Stevens joined her. "You're still here to learn. I'm here to teach. And I'm going to do just that. Whether you're going to do the former or not, well, that's up to you."

The elevator doors whirred open, and Addison stepped inside and turned on her heel to face Stevens, who seemed legitimately torn. It was the measure of a surgeon to be able to cut off the feelings from the surgery, and that was a lesson Stevens was still learning. It was one Addison was still mastering. Addison met the other girl's eyes, and neither of them flinched, and Richard had not been altogether wrong when he said that they were similar. The elevator doors started to close, and it was Stevens' hand that burst out and stopped it, and when they opened again, responding to her touch, she stepped inside with the cool authority of a surgeon. Atta girl, Addison thought, and the elevator doors closed.

…

It was hours later when Addison told Stevens to go grab some food and she went to go grab a cup of instant hot chocolate from the coffee station that George O'Malley stopped her and asked her if she was really leaving Seattle Grace. "My, how the rumors fly," Addison said dryly, stirring the powdered chocolate into the hot water—not her preferred method of making hot chocolate, but beggars could hardly be choosers, and when she arched her eyebrow at him, he looked as though she might sting him, viperlike. "Did Dr. Burke tell you that?"

O'Malley looked sheepish enough to give her an answer, and Addison laughed and shook her head and said, "I have no idea why he would tell you that."

"Because I'm his guy," O'Malley said, and Addison didn't know what that meant, but she laughed and she thought that maybe part of why Callie was so crazy about this kid was that she could imprint herself on him. Addison could understand that—she wanted to tattoo herself on Karev and, when skin stopped touching skin, she wanted to see what he'd left on her.

"You're his guy," Addison repeated.

"Not in a—surgically. Surgically, I'm his guy." For a second, that was all O'Malley had to say, and then he added, "I don't think you should leave, Dr. Montgomery."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Because you do a lot of good here. And—And I just don't think you should go." He smiled at her, the kind of George O'Malley tentative half-smile she was used to, as though he were half afraid someone would strike at him for it. It was impossible for anyone to tell why another person loved someone, because so often the reasons for the emotion were nebulous and intangible, not as easily defined as how they styled their hair or what brand jeans they wore, and unless she were to stand where Callie stood, she'd never know what it was exactly that made her love George O'Malley, but it didn't matter. That was the thing about love. It was what it was what it was. Everything else was just details.

"Well, thank you, Dr. O'Malley," Addison said, and it was genuine, and he smiled that smile again and grabbed a packet of sugar and moved off down the landing. Addison smiled after him and then turned to lean over the railing and look down on the expanse of hospital that she could see from there. The usual hubbub had simmered to a steady pace of people doing what they had to do, filling out charts, doing their pre-op work—and some were socializing, and there was a time and a place for that too. With the cup of hot chocolate between her clasped hands, she was still unsettled by the quiet, and it was always as though the god of hospitals filled the hours before a disaster with negligible follow-up surgeries, the passing of rumors in the hallway, the kind of busybody activities that everyone became so wrapped up in until that moment of an ambulance arriving at the ER doors, and then perspective hit, the writing on the wall printed in backwards letters so they could be seen from a rearview mirror. She prepared for the inevitability of it silently, but even the hot chocolate between her hands couldn't settle her.

"Dr. Montgomery," someone said, and it was so sudden that she nearly dropped the hot chocolate on the heads of the nurses below her. "Dude, you're a little jumpy today," the voice continued, and there was no mistaking that voice for anyone else's.

"Quiet board," she said, tightening her grip on her hot chocolate. He wrapped his hands around the railing beside her, closer than he needed to be, closer than other people might think was decent, but not close enough for her preferences, and when she looked over at him, his attention was where hers had been only moments before—the quiet underbelly of the hospital, the slow, lazy day that was bound to get worse.

Maybe he sensed her attention, the way she let her eyes stroll over his profile, but he turned to look at her, and when their eyes met, she had to keep herself from reaching out to touch him, to linger her fingers over the bruise on his cheek, to remark on his shaving job, to engage in all the tiny, intimate activities that people involved did. Time and place, Addison, she reminded herself, and he was the one to move his hand just close enough to brush her skin, as though it was vital, _necessary_ to do it, a physical recharging. "Dr. Montgomery," he said, and it was a reminder to himself of the _when _and the _where_ they occupied.

"Dr. Karev," she said, and she used it the same way. It would have been easy to lean over and kiss him briefly, a tiny perfunctory kiss to remind each other that they were still in it—and in it together. The problem came when the part of Addison that was all MD reared its head and said, If you kiss him and someone sees you, you'll never be able to hand-pick him for your service again. You'll never be able to ask him to assist on a surgery. Your ability to teach him will substantially diminish.

And that was important to her. It was more important than stealing a kiss, no matter how much she wanted to. He came here to learn. This was the constant reminder to herself, the mental post-it note. Here she was his teacher. And here it was her job to set a good example.

"Dr. Karev," she said again, clearing her throat and looking out once more on the people below them. "I have a follow-up surgery this afternoon. Neurosurgical repair for the brachial plexus. Would you like to scrub in?"

He laughed a little, as though he got her game, and he rolled his shoulders backwards as he straightened up, and he said, "Yeah, yeah, I'd love to." He rubbed the back of his neck, and she expected that to be the end of the conversation, two doctors, civilly discussing their work, and then she felt the brush of his hand on her shoulder, moving her hair out of the way, and he said, "You know, this thing—"

"We need to talk about it some time." It sounded more ominous than she intended, filled with the gloom-and-doom of the imminent 'this isn't going to work', but Alex had to know that that wasn't where she was going with that. "About whether we're—you know, if we're."

"A thing," Alex supplied helpfully.

"A thing," she said.

"Oh, we're a thing," he said without even a second's hesitation. "We're definitely a thing."

And that seemed to almost be that, his assertion sealing the deal, and she couldn't help feeling a surge of happiness about it—they were a thing. Officially a thing. What that meant, she had no idea, but there it was. They were a thing. With nothing to say and her cheeks probably a little red, she offered him her cup of hot chocolate. "Juju?" she said.

"What the hell's juju?"

"It's like … well, it's good luck. It's that good luck charm you have to have."

"My mom had something like this," he said, "but it was a rabbit's foot. Her brother shot the rabbit and skinned it and cut off the foot for her. Seriously pretty gross." He took the cup from her, looking a little doubtful, as though she'd slipped in something unsavory or a little voodoo-inspired, and when he took a sip and withdrew the cup again, the hot chocolate left a tiny bit of its imprint on the corner of his mouth. It was without premeditation that she reached up to wipe it away with her fingertips, her thumb sweeping under the bow of his lip for good measure, but it was with perfect clarity that she said, "I shouldn't do that."

"Do what?" he asked, leaning in to her a little further and displacing her focus.

"Touch you. With people around." He was so close to her that she thought she might lose her self control and resolve altogether, and she cleared her throat and said, "Well, Dr. Karev, I should be getting back to the NICU—"

"Addison."

"But I'll page you when we're ready—"

"Addison," he said again, but she'd already maneuvered herself around the coffee cart and started off in the direction of the double doors. Alex was not to be so easily shaken off, however, and when he spoke, his voice rose with every step she took further away from him, "So other surgeons can hook up in the exam room, and we can't even flirt when we see each other in the hallway?"

There was something to be said for his frankness, but when Addison whirled around to look at him and to survey the damage his outburst had caused, loud enough for at least the whole top level to hear, she was certain she was flustered enough to be pink. There were certainly those doctors and nurses passing by who stopped to look, but perhaps finding the drama routine, kept walking, but that didn't save Addison's embarrassment. She fumbled for a moment for the right words to say, and Alex stood with his arms over his chest, his expression one of discontent, and Addison found she had nothing. So in silence she turned, pushed open the double doors, and left Alex standing behind her.

…

And then it was a couple hours later when her body was finally giving up on her that she decided no harm would come from taking a nap, and she could certainly use the refreshment before her follow-up. Spending all day avoiding Mark—and now she could add Alex to that list—was exhausting, and she stopped by the on-call room and opened the door to darkness. There was the shuffle of clothing and muffled voices, engaged in whatever it was people found it appropriate to do in the on-call room, and Addison realized she had caught someone _in flagrante_. "Oh God, oh God," a voice said, unmistakably Izzie Stevens—not in the throes of passion, but instead in the humiliation of being disturbed, and Addison quickly closed the door again. It had never been in her nature to be a voyeur.

Her first instinct was to laugh. What it was about the hospital, the death and the dying, that steered people's libidos so intensely, Addison would never know, and more power to Izzie for getting while the getting was good—but as Addison replayed the scene in her head, the blond head, the man with her, the coat hanging from the support bar of the bunk, her second instinct was to cry.

Alex's coat. The same one in the exact same spot it had been the night he came to sleep with her in the bunk.

_Well_, Addison thought, and that was as far as her brain would let her get. Well. She would deal with the emotional fall-out later. She would go get drunk, and she would overcome, just as Addison always did. But first things were first, and she went to the nurses' station and asked the girl behind it to please give her a blank piece of paper and a marker. The requested items proffered, Addison took them and wrote, with the calm venom of a woman scorned, 'This room is not for conjugal visits.'

It seemed so familiar, the whole situation, and that was what she hated most about it. She grabbed some tape and returned to the door and affixed her new tiny way of asserting her power, and before she had time to admire it or think any further on the repercussions of what she had just witnessed, the floor was a symphony of the steady succession of pagers beeping.

_Well_, thought Addison. At least she'd been right about the quiet board.

To be continued.


	9. I Can't Feel My Hand Anymore

**Viscosity**

_Summary: _In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post Some Kind of Miracle and for the rest of the season.

_Rating:_ T.

_Author's note:_ Before anyone freaks out about this chapter, this story is 197 percent Addisex, and it will end up happy, I swear on everything good and pure. I'm still only about 50 percent of the way through what I plan to do, and hey, it took Meredith and Derek forever to work things out. The next chapter is something a little bit of a surprise, so sit tight. As usual, thank you for the warm response, you guys are awesome.

* * *

**Chapter 9: I Can't Feel My Hand Anymore, It's Alright, Sleep Still**

She took her time to stop by the locker room, to change out of her scrub top, to remove Alex's shirt, which still smelled a lot like him but mostly like her now, which made her feel like maybe she'd made the whole thing up, the sweet, small kisses in the morning and him kissing her neck while Izzie Stevens sat on the bed, and she probably had made it up, she realized, just like she made up that she and Mark could make it work or that she and Derek could go back to the way they used to be, pre-Meredith, pre-black panties, and she folded his shirt, placed it on the bench in front of his locker, and put her scrub top back on. Her pager beeped again, the second round, which meant it was an orange alert now, a major hospital disaster on its way to them, compartmentalized in ambulances, one after the other, and the shirt folding wasn't much, but it felt a little like vengeance.

…

The first woman they unloaded from the ambulances was pregnant—or she had been, and that much Addison could see just by looking at the twelve inches of glass protruding from her abdomen. Dr. Bailey called for her, her voice coming like a bellow over the cacophony of the sirens, and she pushed her way through the sudden swell of people to the back of the ambulance as the paramedics lowered the girl's gurney to the ground. One of the paramedic's hands slipped, and the gurney bounced on the pavement. "Could we _please_ try not to kill the people who aren't dead?" was Miranda's sharp criticism, and the paramedic had the good sense to look scared and sheepish.

"Does she have a name?" Addison asked, and the girl was unconscious, being fed her life through an oxygen mask, and the paramedic, who couldn't have been much older than twenty-five, looked at Addison, panic in his eyes. "A _name_," she said, "does she have a name?"

The wound was intense, a sucking, gaping wound into which the shard of glass had worked itself, a sliver of death directly into her side. The mother might have been savable, but the child was gone. There was no way for it to be alive, and her stomach was so round that she had to be eight or even nine months into her pregnancy—and there might be no way to dispose of the baby, God, _dispose_, like it was garbage, but in a way it was, and a dead child inside of a mother could cause more problems through the umbilical cord, further complicating any recovery. The blood soaked the gauze wrapped around the piece of glass, and it cascaded down onto the gurney, too much blood and too deep a wound, and the blood was thick and so dark it could have been blue, and Addison looked at the second paramedic, who handed down the saline solution and the oxygen, and she asked again, "Does she have a name?"

"Carly," the second paramedic said, "Carly Sampson."

The girl's eyes fluttered at the mention of her name, and the second paramedic began to push the gurney past the waiting line of flashing lights and siren wails, and what she must have been thinking, Carly Sampson, on her back in the gurney, was that her child was hurt—or maybe the shock was enough, too much for her to take, and maybe somewhere there was a father to this child, a husband to this young woman, panicked and losing his mind over her. "She couldn't have been driving a car," Addison said to the first paramedic, who had seen enough tragedy for one day. "She's too far into her third trimester. Someone else was driving her. Find out who and do it _now_."

He nodded, the move so short and tense Addison thought he might have been a balloon about to pop, and it was only when they got the gurney moving, it bumping over the seam between outside and inside, that Carly Sampson reached out and grabbed Addison's hand. Her grip was weak from the blood loss but strong from the conviction. Her eyes opened, and she couldn't speak for the oxygen mask over her face, but it didn't matter—she spoke the universally translatable language of every young mother that Addison saw walk into her hospital. It was the terror of the situation that gave her clarity, the instinctual, primal mother's fear for her child. And there was no way to tell her that the baby was already dead. There was no way to look into her eyes and tell her that there was no saving her child, only saving her, because what kind of life would remain for this woman after this? Judging from her wounds, Addison couldn't even be sure the woman would be able to bear children ever again.

A nurse handed her a stethoscope, and its heaviness in her hand belied its ineffectiveness. All it could do was determine a single vital sign, a rumor of a heartbeat deep inside someone's body—and it was with resentment that Addison, still holding Carly Sampson's hand, bent to find a heartbeat in her womb. The echoing silence of death was what ripped Carly apart more than the piece of windshield lodged in her stomach, and Addison withdrew the stethoscope, unprepared to note the time of death until she knew for sure, and when she met Carly's eyes again, she knew that the other woman knew. And she knew too that she was hoping against hope, and God _damn_ it, Addison was going to hope too.

"Carly," Addison said, and she handed the stethoscope back to the nurse, whose eyes were wide with the impending tragedy, "Carly, my name is Dr. Montgomery. We are going to take you into triage, and then we are going to have to operate. How far along are you? Just nod. Are you eight months?" Her voice was cooler than her head was,

and Carly's eyes flickered and she nodded, the movement difficult for the tubes and wires surrounding her. The nurse reached across in front of her to redress the wound, and it was a massacre of blood around Carly's abdomen. "Okay, Carly, we're going to have this baby a little early," Addison said, and the nurse met Addison's eyes. They both knew. There was no ignorance.

And it was Addison's decision. It was her decision not to tell.

She knew the panic of losing a child. She'd had that moment of panic, and it had been her decision. It was her decision to go to the doctor and have it taken care of, another euphemism she hated, because 'taken care of' implied something else altogether, and then in the hours, days, weeks after, she felt the loss so supremely that it could have been as though she had a miscarriage, which was what it technically was. Forced miscarriage. Blood in the toilet, thanks to the drugs, and that was the wonder of modern medicine, but there were no drugs for the destruction of her body and the contagion of her head. And in the moments when she needed people most, Derek was in Seattle, and Mark wouldn't speak to her nor she to him, and that was her fault too. Her decision.

Just like this was her decision. "Carly," she said, bending low over the young woman again. She could tell she'd been a beautiful girl, still was a beautiful girl for the panic in her face and the blood on her skin, and Addison said, "Carly, was your husband driving your car? Just nod for me."

It was then that Carly's expression of panic and fear turned to tears, and as they welled up and spilled over out of her eyes and slid down her face, they traced paths in the dried blood—and she nodded. "Find the husband," she said to the nurse, to anyone who would listen. "Stop this bleeding, prep her for surgery, check the board for the OR, and get her to me as quickly as you can. I'm going to go scrub in. And someone page Dr. Karev for me—I need his hands on this one."

…

The call to the OR came from one of the other operating rooms, and it was Derek for Addison, and one of the surgical nurses answered and held it out and said, "Dr. Shepherd, Dr. Montgomery." Her hands were scrubbed clean but not gloved, and the nurse held the phone to the side of Addison's head and it was Derek's voice to tinnily tell her that he had Will Sampson in his OR with major head and spine trauma and it was unlikely that he'd survive, and even if he did, the spine was severed. He would be paralyzed, regardless of the outcome of the surgery. And Addison digested this. Carly Sampson was moments away from an emergency c-section on Addison's operating table, her husband was only a few doors down, and Addison knew, sickly, that it was improbable that the child she pulled out of Carly's womb was intact, let alone alive. And she had to take a shaky moment to gather herself. She didn't know what she was saving this woman's life for—the chances were high that what she would be living with was the death of her husband and the death of her child, and how would she survive that? Addison didn't know Carly Sampson, but she didn't have to. To lose a husband, to lose a child, it could be nothing short of devastating.

But it wasn't her call to make, the determination of life or death for a young woman for whom life might be worse than death. _Primum non nocere_—first, do no harm. The windshield in her side had missed vital organs but impaled the womb, like an arrowed death warrant for the child alone, and Addison had to stop in the doorway between scrub room and operating room and bend over to keep from vomiting. Would she want to be saved? If she, pregnant and married, knew her child and husband would not survive, would Addison choose to live? Would she take the noble course and go on with her life, determined to _overcome_, as she was always so proud of doing? Or would she give up?

It was not a choice a doctor would allow her in a time of disaster. This was the power bestowed upon her, and it was the responsibility. She would save Carly Sampson, regardless of what happened beyond the operating room. Addison Forbes Montgomery would do what she was trained to do.

The outside door to the scrub room opened and shut with a perfunctory swish of its plastic base on the tile floor, and Addison looked to see Alex Karev, fresh in his scrubs, light blue for interns, and his matching light blue scrub cap, passionless and lacking personality, but he would grow into that too, and she suddenly regretted having him paged for this surgery. It was too much even for her to bear—and no matter how angry or how hurt she was by the carelessness of his actions, she could not retaliate in kind.

"Ad—Dr. Montgomery, are you—"

She straightened up, and with the movement solidified herself, rebuilt her backbone. She had faked it the night before. Now there was no faking. For the sake of Carly Sampson, there was no faking. "Dr. Karev, I don't want you scrubbing in on this surgery."

"But I got the page—"

"They need you down in triage more. I can handle this."

She met his eyes fearlessly, and he almost balked under her strength. And then she saw it, the animal of anger and defensiveness rising in his eyes, the defense mechanism he must have learned from years of mistreatment from his father or from other people in his life he did his best to love but never could; she hated that she brought it out in him, but she would not do this to him. She would not let him help her pull a dead child out of a woman's womb, and she would not let him be there when she had to tell the mother. These were the things better suited for experienced surgeons, and no one, not even Addison, was strong enough for it. But the burden was hers. It was her decision. And she would keep him at arm's length surgically if it was what it took to save him this.

"We're a good team," Alex—Dr. Karev—said, the anger hardly disguisable in his voice. Some things he could hide well, and some things he could easily color over with other things—as Addison had learned from their personal situation—but this was different, as though an affront to his professional ability.

"I don't have time to explain this to you. Leave, Dr. Karev."

He wouldn't understand. And she couldn't expect him to. When he turned and went, slamming the door behind him, she knew that that had been her decision too, but one day he'd thank her for it.

…

The child was dead, and as was protocol in a time of disaster, it was put into a tiny body bag marked with a disaster tag, DOA, and there was no removing the image of the six-pound infant, white from blood loss and blue around the mouth from lack of oxygen, shriveled in upon itself, being placed into the body bag, the smallest the coroner had but still too big for the newborn. And it was hardly a newborn, the _born_ an inaccuracy, and Addison vomited into a garbage can behind the nurse's station after the surgery, and then she prayed to a God she wasn't always sure existed for the strength to do the next surgery, the surgery on the mother to repair the womb and the internal injuries.

It was adrenaline that kept her going, the roughness of its edges and the grain of its texture, and as she stood, her hands tight around the edges of the garbage can, Derek interrupted her, a hand on her shoulder. It was the reassurance of one surgeon to another, and she didn't have to ask him to know that Will Sampson had died on the table. The bodies were beginning to pile up outside the morgue, as they did in a time of disaster, the morgue too small to accommodate the number of people who arrived at Seattle Grace and ended up with DOA tags on their toes. It was the physical representation of tragedy, and Addison wiped the back of her hand over her mouth and met Derek's eyes.

And it hit her then that he never knew about her abortion, about her decision to destroy a child who hadn't even developed enough to be included in the legal definition of _child_, but Derek was her family, her husband-who-was, and he never knew. Her secrets she had given away to Alex Karev, who did with them what he would and then slept with a girl, casually and without thought, in the on-call room. "Addison," Derek said, and she shook her head and said nothing. There was just nothing to say.

…

She went to triage after she could do nothing for Carly's womb—her chances for family had been mutilated by an overturned oil tanker on the interstate, wiped away in a second and then damaged beyond recognition—and it was there that she got the page to return to the ICU to talk to her patient, who was slowly waking up. Medical school had been rife with role-play situations, mimicking this kind of thing, but when the role-play was over, everyone laughed and criticized everyone else's acting talents, and that just wasn't going to happen with Carly Sampson. She got into the elevator to return to the intensive care floor, and the person to step inside with her was Mark.

Addison was too exhausted for it, the torment of his wishy-washy affections, his determination to make her feel like hell at the same time he wanted to win her back, _back,_ as though there was a back to return to, and when he pressed the button for the third floor, he said, "Tomorrow's the day."

She wrapped her hands around the railing behind her, and there was something about it, something so profoundly _pathetic_, that she could feel the heat of tears in her eyes, and she turned around to face the wall and steady herself. It didn't matter about Alex and Izzie Stevens. It didn't matter, because she wasn't going to Mark. There would be no capitulation, no changing of her mind—she would not just give up on the things she decided, because then she was just proving to herself that she could not stand on her own without Alex Karev. To tell Mark that she would be with him when they had both upheld the ends of their bargains, both of them without sex for sixty days, made her sick. Just like the thought of Alex and Izzie made her sick. And the thought of Carly Sampson, broken womb and soon-to-be-broken heart, in a bed in ICU as Addison stood in an elevator so concerned about her love life made her sick too. And there was just no going back, whether Alex was in the equation or not.

She and Mark had never been about her and Alex. And the pathetic thing, the thing that made her hate Alex, was that she and Alex had never been about her and Mark. No, she was doing that on her own. Because she liked him. Because she cared about him. And God, maybe over the last couple of months she'd even begun to fall in love with him a little. But that was okay. She'd overcome.

"So I guess that's it then," Mark said, and it was strange, because she never expected him to be the one to throw in the towel first. She always suspected him to be the last man standing, but maybe Mark had matured. Maybe he saw in her that they were never going to be together again. Just like she said. Or maybe he just thought she'd broken yet another promise—and the idea of that made her angry.

"I guess that's it," she echoed, and she wiped at her eye before the tears could find the audacity to spill. "And on the record, I never slept with him."

Mark didn't say anything, and the closure was abrupt and a little sadder than she'd ever intended, but that was the way her closure seemed to be packaged lately—in harsh, small packages delivered at inopportune times and by unfortunate people, and she would take it whichever way it came. She could stave off the tears for a little while too, because once those elevator doors opened, she would have to be a professional. "This is a little sad," she said, turning back around to face the doors, her eyes dry and her resolved stiffened.

Mark looked over his shoulder at her and he said, "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

When the elevator reached the ICU floor, Addison didn't look at him again or say anything further. And that, as far as she was concerned, was that.

…

The hospital psychologist waited outside Carly's ICU room, more prepared than Addison was to deal with the emotional fallout, but it was Addison's job to deliver the news, an eternal messenger of pain and death, and this was the part that was the worst. To lose a patient on the table, that was horrible, and to witness death again and again and again was devastating, but to stand in front of the ones who were left and make their worlds a little lonelier with the deliverance of a couple of pieces of information, that was the hardest. Until the doctor arrived, people could pretend, they could make it go away. Addison was the hard truth no one could escape. Carly looked small and half-eaten by the ICU bed, her legs truncated by the incline, and with her face and hair cleaned, she looked more like the pert, pretty blonde Addison expected her to be. Carly had been in and out of consciousness, that was what her ICU nurse had said, and Addison clutched the girl's chart to her chest like a security blanket or a barrier to the pain, and she knew that was selfish.

Addison got to go home. She got to come back to work the next day. The people she loved, they were still alive, and she'd have the time in her life to make a hundred different mistakes, and maybe one day she'd still have a family with a man who loved her, but Carly would never have that opportunity, not biologically, and not with the man she'd chosen to spend the rest of her life with.

When Derek finally arrived—and it was protocol for him to be there, as the physician operating on Carly's husband—he put his hand on the small of her back and lead her into Carly's ICU room. It was just like any other patient's room, just like any other occasion in which Addison had had to walk in and deliver bad news, but this time was different. It was so different Addison could feel it in the nerves of her teeth, and she took the seat next to the bed so that she could meet Carly's eyes. "Carly, I'm the surgeon who operated on you. My name is Dr. Montgomery? Do you remember me from the emergency room?"

The nod of her head was shallow; she had to be weak and groggy still from the drugs, but her eyes were lucid, and Addison knew what she wanted to know most. And what could she say that didn't sound callous or unfeeling? What was there to say that wouldn't break her heart? The delivery was negligible. The news was the same. "We had to remove a large piece of glass from your abdomen, which severely damaged your womb."

Derek took a seat on the other side of the room, and the movement distracted her for a second. He was watching her and not Carly, and she met his eyes, hoping to draw from him the same strength she'd always been able to, the kind of strength that had always made them Addison-and-Derek, but although his eyes were kind and warm and sympathetic, he was reserving his strength for himself. She'd have to find hers on her own.

And when Addison looked back at Carly, she knew that the other woman knew what was coming, had probably known from the second the gurney landed on that sidewalk outside and Addison's eyes met hers for the first time. "In order to save your life, we had to perform an emergency c-section. You will make a full recovery, but—"

But what, Addison? her brain asked her. But what. You're about to tell a woman your child is dead, and it was so different from waking up from an outpatient surgery to a doctor saying, 'Well, you're all done'. It was so vastly different, and Addison's throat constricted, and her mouth was suddenly dry, but this just wasn't about her. It was about the young woman in the bed who had spent all day fighting for her life and won, but in the process lost the things dearest to her. "We were not able to save your child," Addison said, and the internal monologue had only taken seconds, but it felt like years. "And it is unlikely that, without a womb donor, you will ever be able to bear children naturally."

And that was it, the band-aid ripped off, and that was the end of the hard part for Addison but the beginning of the terrible part for Carly Sampson. It wasn't over for Carly. Addison kept her eyes on the other girl's until Carly began to cry, silent tears that filled her eyes and burst onto her cheeks, and that was when Derek stood up to take Addison's seat.

…

It was only a little later when Addison stepped into the elevator with Preston Burke that she started to cry, the exhaustion of the day finally catching up to her and pulling her down with it. In her first moment of being away from the maddening crowd, she let it all go, the uncontrollable devastation of losing Carly's child, her despair at her inability to save Carly's womb, Alex and Izzie Stevens in the on-call room, and Mark too, because goodbyes, no matter how desired, were never easy, and she let herself cry for the first time in what felt like a very long time. The mascara didn't matter, the way she knew it would run down her cheeks and leave her with the long dark track marks that would serve as evidence of her breakdown. All that really mattered was that girl in that ICU room and Addison's sheer willpower to just keep going.

But she had to turn around and face the wall again, because Preston was her friend, but more than that he was her colleague. And she couldn't stand there and pretend that everything was fine. He leaned against the wall of the elevator, and she saw him out of her peripheral vision, strong and solid and _there_, and she cried in her silence, and what Preston Burke said was, "You don't quit. Addison Montgomery never quits."

"I don't quit," she repeated, and she meant it, every last God forsaken syllable of it, but she felt drained, her hair loose and limp, her face wet with her own tears, black pools of makeup forming under her eyes. She felt tired enough to give up, if only for a day, but Preston was right—Addison Montgomery didn't give up. Not now, not ever.

The elevator stopped, and Addison tightened her hands around the railing, hoping to get strength from the cool, solid piece of metal. The door behind them opened, and Addison saw Preston move forward, and she heard him say, "Maybe you should take the next elevator down."

That was friendship. It was good, true friendship, like the kind she had with Callie, and with that too there was respect, a kind of professional courtesy that doctors paid one another. Everyone had their days. Addison was no different. And she expected the nurse or the doctor or the lost patient or whoever it was to stop, agree, and turn around, but it wasn't any of the above, and when someone said, "What's going on?" she recognized the voice quickly and immediately as Alex's.

"Dr. Karev, I really think you should take another elevator."

It was Preston's measured surgical coldness that made him so scary, but Addison knew that Alex was not going to let himself be bullied, not twice in one day. And the truth was that maybe she didn't owe him a thing, not after what had happened before—maybe they didn't owe each other anything, which is how what happened before _happened_, and she straightened her back and said calmly, "Dr. Karev, I really think you should go."

"No," he said, and the single syllable was explosive, as though he'd been waiting all day just to tell her to shove it. That was rich, Addison thought, because she'd been waiting all day for the same thing. "No. What the hell is wrong with you? You kick me off of a surgery, and now you won't even let me into an elevator."

"Dr. Karev," she said again, and the name was like a walking stick, steadying her for the long haul ahead of her. Her back completely straight, she crossed her arms over her chest, and she stared hard at the wall, but it was her voice that betrayed her, not her crooked body language. "Please leave," she said, and they both knew it sounded more like 'please stay'.

It was her curse that in spite of everything that had happened to her and everything that she had done, she could not cut herself off from the men who hurt her. She returned to them again and again, because they were comfortable, because their arms fit perfectly around her waist, and because the smell of their aftershave triggered memories of times when she wasn't feeling so bruised. And the worst of it seemed to her to be the moments in which she realized that she had not just bruised herself, but they had helped in the bruising too.

"Addison," Alex said, and there was the sound of his hand hitting the closing doors of the elevator and their responsive sliding open again. "Addison, talk to me."

Oh, how she wished she could. How she wished that when he said her name like that, low and sweet and intimate, she didn't imagine him between Izzie Stevens' legs, kissing her neck with a graceful tenderness that Addison hoped was reserved for her, maybe both of them laughing about how stupid Addison had been to let herself fall, even a tiny bit, for Alex Karev. She should have known better.

"Dr. Karev," she said, and it was then that she finally decided to turn around, to face him, tears in abundance and mascara weeping down her face, her arms over her chest. She said, "Take the stairs." It was not a suggestion or even a plea, but Alex was immovable.

And she hated that. She hated that it was impossible for her to forget that he'd been in the on-call room with Izzie, and she hated that it was harder to forget sleeping in his bed, in his arms, Jesus Christ, _she_ had been in the on-call room with him at one point. She felt herself waver, and no matter how tough she felt, how hard the outer shell was, sometimes she had to break. Sometimes it had to be okay to not be okay.

"What's going on," Alex tried again, and this time it was with less insistence, less accusation than before, the 'what the hell is wrong with you' changing into something deeper, softer, more personal, and she met his eyes steadily.

"I don't want to talk to you about it," Addison said, and it overlapped with Preston's warning, "Dr. Karev."

"Dude, what the hell," Alex said, and she could see the fringes of his frustration bubbling over the edges of his professionalism, tinting the color of his concern for her. He looked at Preston and he said, "Can we have a minute?" and Addison's eyes never moved from Alex's.

"Go ahead," Addison said, weighing the silence. "I can handle this."

She could. She could deal with cheaters and liars, because she had known cheaters and liars, because she had been a cheater and a liar. Preston made a noise deep in his throat, a grunt of disapproval, and he looked at Addison and then at Alex, and he said, "Watch yourself."

And as scary as Preston always was, Alex showed no sign of shrinking under the weight of Preston's words. Preston passed by Alex on the way out of the elevator, and he gave her once last look, as though to rally her strength, and then Alex stepped past the boundary of the elevator doors and let them close behind him. He turned and pulled out the button for emergency purposes only, and the elevator stopped before it had even really begun, and then they were in silence—complete pregnant silence.

And he stood there a moment and looked at her, his expression one that said he didn't really know what to do for her, and in a moment of forgetting herself, she thought that it might be nice to go to him, wrap her arms around his neck, and let him take care of her. She simply could not do that in spite of herself. She couldn't do it just for the comfort. That would make her a whore for it, and as compelling, as desperate as her need was to go to him, it was her self-respect she stood to lose. He crossed his arms over his chest, mirroring her, and he exhaled loudly, the only sound in the otherwise empty elevator car, and he said, "Dude, seriously. What's going on with you today?"

She hated the way he said that—_today_, as though it were an accusation of PMS or a dismissible bad mood—and it was her defensiveness to answer for her. "You have no right to stand in front of me and ask me what's wrong."

"Don't do that."

"Do what."

"That thing. Where you push me away."

She had to laugh in spite of her tears, because she couldn't understand the sheer audacity of his standing in front of her and telling her to open up to him. Maybe this was how she had appeared to Derek, begging his forgiveness, but Alex wasn't doing that. He hadn't even acknowledged it, _it_, the sin, the betrayal of her trust, and maybe he wouldn't. Maybe she wasn't supposed to care. Maybe that's what he thought this would be, as though he could come to her and seek her company when he wanted that, and if not, he'd find it where the finding was good. It made her sick. "I don't want you anywhere near me."

"What the fuck is wrong—"

"You can just leave this elevator now too," she said, no patience for yet another demand of her to explain her actions, as though she had anything to explain. She went for the button by the door, but he was firmly between it and her, and he stopped her, one hand moving to her hip, the other to her neck, thumb just below the line of her jaw. It made him too close for her to refuse, close enough for her to remember but hardly close enough for her to forget, and she said, her voice calm, her stomach in shreds, "Get your hands off of me."

His hand moved from her hip to the other side of her face, and he pulled her closer and said, "Addison, I get that you're into this whole stronger-than-everyone thing. I get that. I do it too. But with me—hey, look at me—with me, you don't have to."

It would have been so God-damned perfect. It would have been the sweetest thing anyone had ever managed to say to her, and in spite of the sincerity of his mouth and the intensity of his eyes, she couldn't believe him. She couldn't get where he got off, who he thought he was manipulating. And she wanted to be so angry with him—but she wanted to give in to him too, he with the warm hands and the warmer arms, who looked so ready to take care of her. It was the disparity that killed her—the difference between the man Alex Karev was when he stood in front of her and the man he seemed to be when he was elsewhere. This was the Alex Karev who held tiny Alex McEnroe in his arms and cried, and this was the Alex she was saving from having to pull a dead infant from his mother's womb, and for a second the thought that hit her mind was that what if it was her in there where Carly Sampson was. Husband dead, child dead. Life gone. And what if instead of being Addison Montgomery she'd been Addison Karev and her unborn child had been theirs, the one thing she'd have of him long after he was gone, and what if she lost them both in the sudden squealing of tires and one car pilling up onto another?

This was the thought that wrecked her, and she felt herself crumple. There was no hiding from him now. Her tears gave her up, as they always did, and she tried to turn away from him, but his grasp on her was too tight, and when she started to cry, his hand went from her face to the back of her head, and he simply pulled her to him. It was the gracefulness of the act that scared her so badly that she had to wrap her arms around his neck. She needed this, and worst of all, she needed him, but she could not forgive him. She couldn't. She just couldn't. It mattered little when her knees started to give and he lowered them both to the cold floor of the elevator, she half in his lap and his arm moving to tighten around her waist. They were all awkward legs and arms, he holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe, and they clung together, the need stark and desperate, something she wouldn't have been able to articulate except through this, the exposure of herself to him.

Hers was a wound that would never heal, but she had come to accept that. His was a hurt that could never be eased, and she understood that too. It didn't change anything, but she could ignore it. Just for now, she told herself. Just for now. On her mouth was the salt of her own tears, and Alex's hand moved away the hair on her neck so that he could kiss her skin. They were not sensual kisses—instead they were the fierce, loyal kisses of a man who cared, and he let her cry. He just let her cry, his arm squeezing tighter whenever a sob moved her rib cage, as though to remind him that he was there.

It was only when the tears were replaced with exhaustion that she allowed herself to move back and look at him. Her arms still around his neck, they were close enough to kiss, and he brushed some hair off of her cheek that had stuck with the wetness of the tears. She waited for the almost condescending clichéd whispers of comforting things, the things he would say that would make no difference at all and only sound hollow, but they never came. He said nothing, and she was the one to kiss him first.

It was because, she told herself, she didn't remember kissing Derek goodbye, and she couldn't remember kissing Mark goodbye, and this one she wanted to remember. She wanted to carve it into the bark of her memory and take it with her, long after this was over, and she might label it under the file of The One Who Got Away. The kiss was pressing and a little desperate, but his hand moved to the back of her head again and he kissed her back, both of them tasting of salt and the cups of coffee they'd managed to grab to keep themselves awake in between tragedies, and she didn't know where the need came from. She didn't know what started it or when it would end. Addison had never needed anyone, but she needed him.

Or maybe she was getting her vocabulary wrong. Maybe it wasn't need. Maybe it was something else, something stronger, and she couldn't afford that. There was no way to convince herself that it would be alright to let herself fall for a man who slept with other women in the on-call room. There were too many pairs of other women's panties in her history.

And it was while kissing him that she decided they couldn't do this. His kisses were sweet and strong and everything she had been wanting from a man for so long—and it wasn't that he wasn't like Derek or that he was like Derek or that he wasn't like Mark or that he was like Mark, because they no longer factored. This was her and Alex. And she just couldn't do it. She broke off the kiss, a little breathless from the tears and his mouth against hers, and she covered his mouth with her fingers so she wouldn't kiss him again. Maybe she looked like a train wreck, but she couldn't let her emotions be the same way, and she said, "No, we can't. We can't do this. I can't do this, Alex."

"Yes, you can," he murmured against her fingers, and he didn't seem to get it. This wasn't the usual protestations of a woman who wanted a man to chase her. This was Addison Montgomery, putting her foot down.

"No," she said. And then more firmly, "_No_." It took all of her willpower to stand up, to extract herself from him, to lean over and press the emergency button. The elevator heaved with the weight and then began its course again, and as she stood up, he stood up too. She straightened her scrub top, smoothed her hair, brushed the remaining tears from under her eyes, and she said, "We can't do this."

"What the hell. You and I, we make sense. What is this even about?"

His look was one of genuine confusion. Maybe he hadn't realized he'd been caught in the on-call room. Maybe he felt as innocent as the day he was born. There were mascara marks on his scrub top, her black stains left on him, and she met his eyes and said, "This is about the on-call room, Karev."

The last name came like a divider, the separation of her from him. It was a reversion to the people they once were. "The on-call room?" he said, his eyebrows slipping upwards in surprise. "When you and I—oh, you mean Izzie."

Oh, you mean Izzie. Just that cavalier. So glib and flippant. Like it was nothing. And Addison waited for what he had to say for himself, because some part of her, some aching inner part of her, thought that maybe, just _maybe_, if it was a damned good reason then she could forgive him.

And let herself fall in love—even if she suspected it might have been a little late for that.

But what he said in the stead of any good explanation was, "What does that have to do with anything? Unless—unless you're still—" And then the bright dawning of realization spread. Unless I'm still _what_, Addison thought. Unless I'm one of those women who likes the men she's involved in _things_ with to not be involved in things with other people, she thought, and she retreated to the other side of the elevator.

It chimed, signaling its arrival finally, and she saw something flicker in his eyes, the old animal of defensiveness, and in the seconds before the door opened, he said, "You know, I totally get it now. So just—whatever. Forget the whole thing."

And then the doors opened and he walked out, and it was strange to Addison how she'd been the one to call the whole thing off and yet she was the one feeling heartbroken.

To be continued.


	10. I Know, and I Said Forget It

**Viscosity**_  
_

_Summary: _In the wake of the ferry disaster, Addison struggles to find herself again among the men in her life. AU post Some Kind of Miracle and for the rest of the season. This chapter is Alex's POV.

_Rating:_ T.

_Author's note:_ This chapter was oddly hard to write, so be nice with it. Maybe it's the post-last-episode depression. Oh, and like I said with the last chapter, I really do promise they'll work it out.

* * *

Chapter 10: I Know, and I Said Forget It

After Addison left his bed the morning after—morning after, _ha_, he thought, as though there'd been anything to talk about last night, it was a morning after nothing whatsoever, but he couldn't complain about the way she didn't mind that they woke up with his leg between hers—Alex sat and stared at the ceiling. It didn't surprise him that she could get him worked up by just being in his bed, but it also didn't make this sleeping-together-without-sex thing any easier. The night before they'd been so close he could actually taste it, and then stupid, moronic Izzie had to come and interrupt—that wasn't Iz's fault. She was just being Izzie. He couldn't help the bristling of resentment towards her about it, but the beauty of this whole thing was he was pretty sure that wouldn't be his one shot with Addison. In fact, he was pretty damned positive.

He could also get used to this, the waking up with her thing, even if it meant dealing with the pager and the odd hours, and the fact that she was his boss, and all of the other bullshit that came along with it, but if Grey could figure it out, hell, so could he. Meredith was kind of getting her shit together, which was more than could be said for the rest of them, and if she could do it, anyone could. They'd all been through their own private hells, and Alex wasn't any different.

He started thinking about calling Addison back—weren't there other neonatal surgeons in the Seattle metropolitan area? Was it too much to ask to just get ten minutes—who was he kidding, he needed more than ten minutes—alone with her where they were both sober, lucid, and energetic? He had an itch that needed to be scratched, but more than that, it was possessive. He wanted to prove to her that he was in this. He wasn't going anywhere. He'd almost fucked everything up with his little diatribe in the closet, and he wasn't going back there again. His defense mechanisms, and this was something he'd always known, _sucked_. Olivia was pretty big proof of that. And Christ, when he hadn't been able to get it up for Iz, which was ridiculous and one of the most humiliating moments of his life. So sex was one coping thing, and fighting was the other, and as he stared up at the ceiling, he promised himself that he was going to make those into positive aspects of this rela—well, whatever it was.

After a minute, he realized Addison wasn't coming back, which meant his ass needed to get up and get ready for work. Nobody ever called out sick from a shift, but he would have contemplated it if she came back to his room and said, Hey, Karev, let's do it, let's stay in bed. She wasn't coming back, and he hadn't really expected her to, but it was a nice little fantasy—she in his shirt and nothing else except for maybe flimsy little panties, and God, he liked his shirt on her.

But all that said and done, he still had to go to work, not sit around and think about what he wanted to do to Addison. After that pager had gone off, they entered a weird place of professional behavior, and hell, he still had a job to do. So, grudgingly, he pulled himself out of bed, found a beanie and a t-shirt on the floor, slid on a pair of slippers and padded out into the hallway.

He and Izzie hadn't worked out the doing the toothbrushing-in-the-morning thing yet. They hadn't worked out much of anything. And as he groggily made his way into the bathroom to at least take care of the bare essentials, she glared at him in the mirror. It really was like college again, random girls from down the hall hanging out in his dorm room, except he wasn't sleeping with Izzie, and if everything went the way he was really hoping, he wasn't going to sleep with her ever again. Not that she wasn't attractive, because she was. There was no denying that. Even with her glaring at him in the mirror, her lips in that awful petulant pout. He'd always really liked blondes. And he liked stacked blondes. And he'd liked Izzie, but there weren't even any remnants of that left. Maybe this was what women meant when they said they could find someone attractive without being attracted to them. He'd always taken that for bullshit, but there she was, attractive as hell, and he had no desire to pull her into the shower with him.

Izzie blinked at him and then covered her mouth with her hand. He reached for his own toothbrush and toothpaste, still a little wet from Addison's use of it, which was kind of hot, actually, and he never thought that sharing his personal shit like that would be attractive, but hey, he'd never been one for _cuddling_ for any entire night either, at least not without a promise of a pay-off, and it was halfway between the sink and his mouth when Izzie said, hand still hiding her mouth, "Could you turn around?"

"What, why?" he said, still too groggy to be able to interpret her girl shit.

"Because I have to spit and I don't want you to see it."

"Christ, Iz," he said, but he did it, because it was do it or get yelled at, and he just wasn't in the mood for the latter. He stuck his toothbrush in his mouth and listened to her spit and then turn on the faucet, and it wasn't until she told him he could turn around that he did so, and they met eyes in the mirror.

"Look, about last night—" she said, and he shook his head and she fell silent.

"Nah, don't—just don't. We can just leave it."

She kept her eyes on his, looking like she wanted to say something more or like she was itching for the fight, but the truth was, he just wasn't, and there was no point to doing the rumble. Maybe he was getting older—but really the answer was he'd just finally moved on from her, and he was comfortable with that.

…

It was after his shower that Izzie came back to put on her mascara, and he nearly dropped his towel as she burst into the bathroom. "I'm not looking, I'm not looking," she said, cupping her hand around her eye to illustrate her point, nevermind that she could look three inches to her right and see him in the mirror. "Not that I'd want to look. Because I don't. Want to see anything."

He wondered if anyone had ever told her she was crazy before, and then he decided that he probably had, and he went to the sink, oblivious to her scattered mumbling to herself. "Dude, chill, I have a towel on."

It was only then that she tentatively made eye contact with him in the mirror, and after she bent down to retrieve her mascara from the cabinet under the sink, she straightened up and narrowed her eyes at him. Then she tapped the tube of mascara against her mouth, as though trying to analyze him, and then she said, "You look happy. I don't mean happy. You never look, like, sad. But you look—you know, _rested_. Well, not rested, because rested would mean that you slept, and I bet you didn't, hubba hubba—"

"Iz."

"No, that's fine, you really don't have to tell me."

Her concern for his sex life was less-than-endearing. He might have found it cute under normal circumstances, but as it was, she'd been pretty essential in making sure he got none the night before. "But did you—you know. With Dr. Montgomery."

"Iz, seriously, knock it off."

"You seriously did, didn't you?" It was strange how her thinking he had, whether he had or hadn't, changed the scope of her face. She suddenly looked a little pissed at him, which wasn't his fault. He didn't even get that. What room did she have to be mad? Wasn't she the one who told him she wasn't ready? Did it just piss her off that Addison was an attending? Or that she and Addison didn't get along all that well sometimes? Was it just a girl thing?

"Dude, I'm not telling."

"Alex, you can tell me. We're like friends sometimes. And friends tell friends things, like when they have sex."

"Iz," he said again, but it didn't matter. Arguing with Izzie was like wrestling with a pig—he just got dirty, and the pig just enjoyed it. "Like rabbits," he finally said, bending down to look for his razor. "Is that what you want to hear? Dude, like, eight times."

That was all it took to turn Izzie off to the conversation completely, and she exploded at him with a high-pitched whimper and then took off out the door, slamming it behind her. And then she threw the door open again and opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, he said, "Rabbits, Iz."

That was when she yelled at him, "This house is a den of hedonism," and slammed the door once last time.

…

They sat down to lunch—or not even lunch, who had lunch at 10AM?—Alex and Grey and Yang and O'Malley, and Alex watched as O'Malley pushed a pile of congealing mashed potatoes around his tray. He had a shitload of reasons to be annoyed by the day already, and they'd only been at work for four hours. O'Malley messing with the potatoes was threatening to push him over the edge, and he was normally a pretty unflappable guy. But the list was getting longer—the fact that he hadn't gotten laid the night before, which was fine at the root of it, because, hey, he and Addison had survived a night at Grey's without suffering too much, and she'd come over without a lot of fight, which meant they were getting to the place of being a something, but it still made him cranky; Addison hadn't asked him to scrub in on her surgery, which was fine too, except that he was worried she was going to stop asking him to scrub in on things because people might think she was playing favorites—_and_ she'd chosen Izzie to go with her, which was cool, but he had started to genuinely like being in the NICU, and her not choosing him meant he had to be down in the pit all day, but whatever; and Izzie was being a total psycho, on and off again faster than he could tell her to shut up.

He taught himself when he was a lot younger never to show that he felt like anything about anything. His dad'd beat the shit out of him if he so much as cried, and even being a little testy was enough to make the old man shit a brick. So he didn't like to show it, because there was something innate that made him feel like if he did, he'd get a fist across his jaw. It didn't happen a lot when he was a kid, but it happened enough to make him anticipate it.

He was over-thinking things. That had to be Addison's fault. He could always see when she did it, her brain starting to churn, and then she'd get that look on her face which was pretty cute, but usually something he didn't like all that much came out of her mouth after that happened. She was rubbing off on him, but unfortunately not _rubbing off_ on him, and he had to stop thinking about that kind of thing at lunch.

"Dude, would you knock it off," he finally said to O'Malley, who had started pushing the potatoes into a smiley face. O'Malley jerked and looked at Alex like he'd been pinched, and he picked up a green pea and put it in where the eyes should have gone anyway.

"George, are you okay?" Grey asked him.

"Of course he's okay. He got to scrub in on an anterior posterior spinal fusion," was what Yang said. "And if he's not okay, he's ungrateful, and if he's ungrateful, he should let other people do the complex surgeries."

"I'm—if you knew something about someone and it's something that could really change—I mean, not a lot of things, but it could affect people, but it's, like, a secret, or at it's not something everyone should know or does know, and it might not even happen anyway, would you tell?"

"Do you listen to yourself when you talk?" Yang said.

"George, what is it," Grey said in that weirdly patronizing way she always had with O'Malley.

His mouth twitched. The thing about these people, as far as Alex was concerned, was that they weren't the people he'd ever have chosen to spend time with. Yang was high-strung and sometimes just downright _mean_, Grey could be a little bit of a weakling and her brain was a little scrambled, and O'Malley was nice enough but there was no way that the Alex Karev Alex had been a year ago would have been caught dead with these people, but here he was. At the cafeteria table. And O'Malley's mouth twitched again, and Alex was beginning to think maybe he knew something interesting. Seattle Grace was filled with shitty rumors.

"Dr. Burke said—I think that—"

"Just _say_ it," Yang said.

"Dr. Burke—I think Dr. Montgomery-Sh—I think Dr. Montgomery is leaving."

"Dude, _what_," Alex said before he could even keep it from flying out of his mouth. Dude, _what_, his brain said again, and he turned anything else he had to say into a cough, burying it in his hand. When the hell had that decision happened? This morning? Did she get out of his bed and think, 'I seriously can't do this, I just have to _leave_' and just went to Weber and said, I gotta go?

"What, why would she leave?" Grey said.

"Seriously. Isn't she making like, seven figures a year to watch women shoot babies out of their birth canals?" Yang said.

"Did he say when?" Alex said, and there wasn't any reason for panic. He hadn't even slept with the woman yet—but still there was something in his chest that was like, hey, look at me, we're drowning here, and that was exactly what it felt like. An odd, suffocating, drowning feeling. Where was she going to go? Mercy West? Maybe that would even be a good thing, but how the hell was he going to find time to see her? What if she met some McDreamy or McSteamy or McWhateverthehell at her new hospital?

And then panic gave way to anger. Maybe she knew all along that she was getting the hell out of dodge, which made him just some fling, which pissed him off. He'd had flings, but Jesus Christ, he told her about his dad, and she told him about her abortion, and it had _stopped_ being a fling. Flings had more sex and more make-out sessions in supply closets.

"I don't know, and you guys, you can't say anything, because I don't think anything's official, but—Dr. Burke said, he said that he thought she wasn't happy here and that she wanted to go."

Yang laughed and leaned back in her chair and said, "Oh, you have told the wrong people if you don't want it to go anywhere."

Dude, _what_, Alex's brain was still saying, but he couldn't find it in him to be anything but pissed at her. He could just go ahead and add that to his list of reasons why today sucked.

…

And then he saw her, and it was pretty impossible to be pissed at her. He'd had this girlfriend when he was in high school, Melissa, and they broke up because she wouldn't put out (his version) and he was an asshole (her version), and that didn't matter now anyway. He'd been a kid back then, and fucking up was a rule of thumb, but he didn't know why seeing Addison by the coffee cart reminded him of her. They didn't look anything alike, and they weren't anything alike, but the truth was, just being around Addison had started forcing him to make sense of and peace with a lot of shit in his past. It was all one big mess of bullshit that he never really wanted to untangle, because it wasn't worth it, so he just kept it there, at the back of his brain, until maybe one day it'd make him explode. He wondered, suddenly, where Melissa was, what she was doing, if she figured things out in the end. If she ever put out. If she was still the virgin-fucking-Mary. It didn't matter to him anymore. He couldn't be angry about that.

He watched her from the other end of the walkway, and he didn't get how McDreamy—Dr. Shepherd—could ever give her up willingly. Sure, she was a pain in the ass, but she was nothing short of being a seriously hot woman. What had he and O'Malley said—McHot. That was what they'd said. He thought about telling her that. And then he thought not, because that'd blow her ego up, but she deserved to have a hefty ego. She deserved to have men tell her all the time that she was beautiful. He hadn't told her that at all, he didn't think. He should tell her that. And he was allowed to tell her that. He was allowed to, because they were in a _thing_. They were in a … _thing_, and she wasn't going anywhere. She'd have told him that. She would have.

He pretty much had himself convinced when Izzie came up behind him and said, "Wow, you're seriously into her, aren't you?"

"What is with you?" he said, but he couldn't help smiling. Yeah, so what if he was. He didn't need to advertise it, and he certainly didn't have to tell Izzie all about it. But yeah. Yeah, so what if he was.

"No, I think it's cute," she said, and Alex had no idea when Izzie became like a sister to him, but there she was, in all her sisterly glory, harassing him about his love life, and he could handle that. He could use a good friend or two, especially since he'd started making out with one of the few he actually considered a friend. "It is, it's cute. I mean, the last girl you were really into was … well, me."

"Iz, go away."

"You know, you and I could double date now. Well, or maybe not," she added, laughing a little to herself and then laughing a little harder in that weird Izzie way she had of over-responsive giggling, and he had no idea why he hadn't gotten it the night before—_Sloan_. He turned and looked properly at Izzie for the first time since she'd come up to him, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling even more, and he should have figured it out a long time before now.

"Dude. You are so busted."

Sloan. Of all people—it was the one into whose head Alex slammed his fist only a couple of days ago. Sloan. As in the jackass who came across the country to get Addison to go back with him. As in the jackass who sexually harassed Iz every chance he got—and Alex didn't know whether he should have felt relieved or pissed off or what the hell he should have been feeling. Mostly he was concerned for Izzie, because nothing he'd seen made him think Sloan knew how to take care of a woman, and that was what Izzie needed.

But maybe she needed to figure it out on her own too. And he had to be honest, he was pretty fucking relieved. There was no way Mark Sloan, with the advantage of all the history and whatever it was that was between him and Addison, was going to come after Addison again. Alex's Addison. _His_ Addison.

"I didn't say anything," Izzie said, but she didn't really need to. He'd known her long—and intimately—enough to know how to read the guilt in her face.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get out of here. Go find an attending to make out with."

She giggled again and then tried to straighten her face, and she said, "You too, Dr. Karev."

When Izzie turned and went, he decided, fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck the rumor about her leaving—if she was leaving, he'd tell her. And fuck Mark Sloan, because Mark Sloan was no longer his problem, not even a little bit. And fuck whatever else, because for the first time in his life, he felt like maybe, just maybe, he was getting things together. He and Meredith Grey, fixing their fucked-up lives, one relationship at a time. There was that r-word. Thing. He was just going to keep calling it a thing. She'd have to call it a relationship first.

…

Grey was sitting by the outside brick wall, still in her scrubs, when he went out to grab a breath of fresh air, however cold it was. The entire day was making him angry—he knew he should have stayed in bed, not even bothered with it at all, but that wasn't a chance he ever really got. It wasn't that he doubted his surgical ability or being a doctor or any of those decisions he'd made, it was just that there was a very lazy man inside of him, dying to be left in bed. And Addison was just driving him insane. It was totally okay for Yang and Dr. Burke to be engaged, Grey and McDreamy to do whatever the hell it was they did, but Addison couldn't so much as lean in to him a little when they were in public?

When he got outside and he saw Grey, looking a little sad like she usually did, it felt a little like a relief. She wasn't going to judge anyone. She never did, which he appreciated about her. He sat down on the cold sidewalk next to her, pulling his coat shut around him, and she looked over at him and folded her hands in her lap and said, "Hi, Alex."

"Hi, Grey," he said back, and he stretched his legs out in front of her.

"You doing okay?"

"Yeah, why?"

"You just never come and sit with me unless something's up."

"I should be asking if you're okay."

"I'm okay," she said, but she wasn't convincing. He had to admit that he'd been scared when she'd almost been gone, _gone_, as though he didn't deal with dead people all day every day, as though he couldn't say 'died' when it was something that happened every day. "Derek wants me to move in with him. To his trailer. In the woods."

"Yeah? I think Izzie's seeing Mark Sloan."

"Yeah, I know she is," Meredith said, and it was with the quiet, unemphasized inner pout he was used to from her. She was so quiet sometimes she was almost easy to brush aside, but she saw shit. She knew what was going on. And sometimes he just had to give her credit for making it this far. He didn't know if he would have.

He didn't like to think about his mom, back home in Iowa, just trying to find a way to pay the bills, but Grey made him think about it, about the money he sent home to make sure she had enough for groceries and enough for the mortgage. Maybe she didn't need it, maybe it was just him, trying to look out for her, like he'd always done, or always tried to do—and if one day she weren't there anymore, he didn't know what he'd do. And he didn't know how Meredith did what she did.

"Do you think I should do it?" Meredith said, looking over at him.

"Do what, move out?"

"Yeah, move out."

He tried not to think about the fact that it'd leave him homeless, or that he and Izzie would be forced to split a cheap room at a Motel 6. "Do you want to move out?"

"You know how when you're just getting things figured out, you're just finally getting all of your Dominos where they belong, and it's perfect, and then someone comes along and wants to add on to your—your Domino _thing_, and you trust them, you do, you just think that if they're not careful, they could knock the whole thing over?"

Boy, did he. "Dude, me and Addison—"

"You and Dr. Montgomery," Meredith said, as though she were tasting the words, getting a feel for them. As though trying them on. He'd been trying it on too—me and Addison, he'd said, which was his way of saying _we_ or _us_ or yeah, that's right, we're a couple, the two of us. Couple, Christ. "You and … Derek's ex-wife. Derek's ex-wife and you. Is that weird? Do you feel weird about that?"

"Nah," he said, and it was true. It was true in the same way that he didn't have to think when he woke up in the morning about who it was he had his arms wrapped around. And it wasn't weird, just like every time he had to take a scalpel to someone's skin wasn't weird. It just wasn't. It made sense. They made sense. Even if sometimes she made him so angry he could hit something—but wasn't that part of it? Wasn't it part of the deal to fight and be angry and to take some time to figure some shit out? "Nah, it's not weird. She can be a real bitch, but, eh, I don't know. It's not weird."

"You really like her, huh?" Meredith said, and she looked over at him with that weird, soft look she had, the one that said she got it in whatever way he could.

He shrugged—but he laughed, and that was all the confirmation she seemed to need. She nodded, and they could at least share that. It wasn't like he could go to Yang and shoot the breeze about what it was like to be involved with an attending, and there was no way in hell he was going to compare notes with Iz about Mark Sloan. As if he didn't have enough reasons to hate the guy, he didn't need Izzie telling him that Sloan was more well endowed or a better lover or whatthefuckever. He had no jealousy towards Sloan, not where Izzie was concerned, but nobody was a fan of that kind of comparison. Especially not Alex.

"Well, good for you," Meredith said, a hint of amusement in the back of her throat. "I like her, you know. I just didn't like her with Derek. I tried to hate her too—but I don't think you can, really. And I have this new thing since my mom died. I'm going to be happier. I'm going to like more people. More people are going to like me. I'm going to drink less tequila. It's a whole big long thing."

"You guys are so boring," Izzie said, suddenly appearing from around the corner and standing in front of their pairs of feet, eating an apple.

"That's us," Meredith said. "Boring. I think Cristina has an arterial switch with Bailey and Burke, you could go sit in the gallery. Make popcorn. You know."

Izzie rolled her eyes and bit into her apple, and the sound of it smacked in Alex's ears. She was smug about something—and happier. And brighter— all lit up and flushed. She looked pretty that way, and he had seen her looking like that in the brightness of a post-coital glow. Maybe she hadn't been fucking around with Sloan in supply closets, but she sure as hell looked like it. And she was doing the Izzie thing where she was bursting like a fat champagne bottle to tell someone, anyone, what was going on in her head, but she buried it along with her smile behind her apple. That was when she filled in the empty space between Alex and Meredith with her ass, still happily eating her apple.

"What's with you?" Meredith asked as both she and Alex moved out of Izzie's way. "You're like … bubbly."

"I have always been bubbly, Meredith."

"Not lately. Not since—you know."

"Dude, she's getting laid," was what Alex had to say, and Izzie bit into her apple hard. Next to him, she drew her legs up to her chest and wrapped her free arm around them. Meredith leaned forward so that she could look at Alex and make meaningful eye contact, and when she withdrew, Izzie said:

"What, you guys. Was I supposed to mope forever? Denny would want me to be happy."

"With McSteamy?" Meredith said.

Izzie shivered, and Alex didn't know what it was, some knee-jerk brotherly reaction in him or something else, but he pulled off his coat and slid it around her shoulders. She hardly said thank you, but he got it. He knew.

…

Everyone got the 9-1-1 call at the same time, standby orange alert, which meant there was a major disaster heading their way, and the orange alert itself wasn't far behind. The hospital exploded into perfectly choreographed chaos, and Izzie was late to meet up with Bailey to hear what she wanted them to do. Her hair was a wreck and her cheeks flushed, and Alex watched her as she pulled her hair out of its ponytail holder and then slid it back in. Bailey dispersed them, mostly to triage, and as they started off down the hallway, Izzie grabbed Alex's arm and said, "Alex, I think I totally just got caught by Dr. Montgomery—having sex with her ex in the on-call room."

"Whoa, _what_?" Yang said, turning to stare at Izzie hard as they made their way to the elevators down to the imminent chaos. "Your modifiers are dangling. Who was having sex with whose ex? _Montgomery_?" Alex couldn't help the flair of jealousy that burned just under his sternum, but he knew better—even the knowing better didn't help out with the jealousy. He was a jealous guy. He was a jealous guy, and the thought of Sloan's hands on Addison ever again made him want to deck the dude. Again.

"No, shut up," Izzie snapped at her, and Yang's reaction was one of impressed curiosity. "Me and Mark," Izzie said, pulling Alex tighter to her, her gossip intended for him and him only. How had it become that he was the one Izzie turned to when she had gossip, whether it was her own or someone else's? How had he become Izzie's O'Malley? "I think she caught us. I think that was her, anyway. Someone opened the door, and it looked like her, only I was too—anyway, she put this note on the door that was really bitchy, and I just—"

"Stevens," came Bailey's voice, loud and clear through the hustle of her interns, and the entire group of them stopped, the mass of poor, scared interns that they were. The sea parted, and Bailey moved back through the two perfect lines they'd formed until she reached Izzie, and she put her hands on her hips and said, "Stevens, is that your sex life I'm hearing about?"

Izzie's face turned pink, and Alex felt for her, but there was something else on his mind. Addison, a bitchy note, Sloan and Izzie in the on-call room. She wasn't still hung up on that jackass, was she? There was the jealousy again, as rich and ripe as a big fresh apple that he could have reached out and plucked and thrown at someone's head. Maybe that was all it took, walking in on him and another woman, for her to realize that she'd just been dicking around with stupid Alex Karev. And how dumb was he for falling for it? Whatever made him think that she was going to be all that into him? Maybe he'd been right all along about what he said in that supply closet. Maybe this was just a big fucking mess.

"Can we get through one day without someone getting distracted by the people they may or may not be screwing around with? You see this," Bailey said, pointing to her face and drawing a circle in the air. "This is my unhappy face. We have a major car wreck, people, let's get a move on."

And for once, he was thankful for the work at hand. Anything to not think about Addison for a little while.

…

It was carnage in triage. Disaster after disaster, and they never got any easier. They weren't supposed to, which he knew, but he couldn't help looking at the waves of patients as they came in, some in worse condition than others, and thinking about the idiocy of one person, how sometimes all it took was one person to fuck up another person's life forever—or two-hundred people's lives, whatever the case may have been. It was carnage in triage, and he didn't know how many bones he'd set, how many sutures he'd done, how many basic medical exams he'd performed, and how many DOA tags he'd put on people's bodies. It didn't get any easier, and he didn't cope any better. He shut down. It was what he always did, just turned off. Got mean or petulant. Threw silent fits and sulked in a corner. That was how he handled things. That was how he disabled the pain.

And it was hours later, when Bailey finally told some of them that they could go home, and he was making his way back to the locker room, that Shepherd stopped him. He wasn't in the mood for chit-chat. He didn't want to talk about Addison, who'd been a bitch to him all day long, and he didn't want to talk about surgery or dead bodies or whatever the fuck else it was that Derek Shepherd might have to say to him. Alex knew his type: smarmy, cocky, arrogant assholes, who got by on their good looks and their smooth smiles. It was almost Alex's type, but he didn't use charm to survive. He used the bristles he shot out whenever the going got tough. His dad used to call him a moody son-of-a-bitch, and maybe that was true, but he was still alive, and sometimes, Alex stopped to give himself credit for still being around.

"Dr. Karev," Shepherd said to him, Alex's hand on the door to the locker room, ready to push it open, change into his street clothes, and call it one hell of a long, bad day. "Can I have a word with you?" Shepherd said. Alex hated the false sense of respect that he had to pay these people sometimes. Shepherd may have had more surgical experience, more years of training, but he wasn't any better than Alex was. In fact, at Alex's last count, only one of them had a ruined marriage.

"All due respect, it's been a long day," Alex said, and he pushed open the door. That had to be that. Nothing Shepherd had to say could have been important enough that it couldn't wait for the next day or the next day or, hell, three hours from then when Shepherd'd be showing up at the door of the home where Alex was living.

"All due respect, it's about my ex-wife."

That made Alex bristle, but he'd humor Shepherd. My ex-wife, he said, and Alex was trying to figure out whether or not it was possessive, whether or not there was anger or jealousy behind the other man's tone, but Shepherd was pretty impenetrable. "Look, man, I don't want to—"

"Dr. Karev. I wanted to say—what I wanted to say was, don't give up on her. She'll push and she will push and she will push until you don't feel like you have any option but to go. Don't give up on her. Don't let her bully you."

"No offense, but I don't need relationship advice from you."

"I deserve that," Shepherd said, and Alex narrowed his eyes at him. This wasn't out of the blue. This wasn't just Dr. Derek Shepherd showing up to tell him to be nice to the woman he once married. This wasn't friendly, conversational relationship advice. There was concern smeared all over Shepherd's face, and Alex felt a tug of something in his stomach. Had something happened to Addison? Was there something going on that he needed to know about? She'd kicked him out of her OR, and that was the last time he'd seen her. And with the things that happened around Seattle Grace—Yang collapsing during surgery, infectious airborne diseases, bombs in some guy's stomach, a surgeon being shot, and an intern going into the freezing water—there was no way of telling what could have happened to her.

"Is she okay?" Alex asked, and his voice sounded a little passive, a little too reserved for what was happening in his stomach, but that was how Alex always did. He shut down. He put all those dumb, useless feelings he never figured out what to do with into a locker and kept them there. Because they were exactly that—dumb and useless. And he felt that way, dumb and useless, standing in front of Shepherd and panicking over Addison.

"She's—quiet board," Shepherd finished weakly, shrugging his shoulders a little. "I know it's hard, Karev. She's hard. But you'll regret it if you just give up."

If she'd been hurt or injured in any way, Shepherd would have told him. He had to reassure himself with that thought. If she was lying on an OR table somewhere with someone's hands inside her, Shepherd would have told him. And the thing was—maybe Addison had talked to Derek about him. And maybe all that stupid insecurity and jealousy was just that—stupid. If Shepherd was standing in front of him, telling him to fight for her, there had to be a reason. She had to want to be fought for.

"Is that what you did? Give up on her?"

Shepherd looked away and laughed a little, and he didn't look back at Alex when he said, "Yes. But not when you think. I gave up on her long before Mark ever entered the picture."

"You regret that?"

"I regret giving her a reason to cheat, yes." And then he laughed again, and Alex thought that maybe that was Shepherd's defense mechanism. Everybody had their things.

…

Addison had her thing too. It was streaked all over her face, patches of mascara running down her cheeks, and that really wrecked him, because he wanted to do something about it, and she didn't want him to do anything about it, and there they were, in a Mexican stand-off, he on the outside of the elevator, she on the in. Burke passed by him, and he didn't give two shits about what he had to say, unless it somehow helped Addison. When he was gone, Alex weighed his next step carefully, and then he stepped into the elevator.

If he was some other guy—McDreamy, maybe—he might have had the perfect thing to say. He might have been able to pick her up, like he'd done with Izzie, and wrap her up inside of him, and maybe, probably, that would have made her feel better—but only if she were some other woman, someone a little more willing to let people do that for her. And the truth was, he'd never been that guy. Iz liked to tell him that he was soft deep down, but he wasn't. Deep down, he was hard, harder than he wanted to be, and colder too, and he could have blamed that on years of conditioning, but he was past blame. He was just past all of it, his dad and the alcohol and the drugs and the growing up in bars. And he just wasn't the better guy, but he wanted to be the guy Addison came to when she needed someone to wrap her arms around. It had shit to do with wanting to save her or protect her from the jackasses who had taken her for granted for years, it just had to do with wanting to be that guy. Her guy.

But she was looking at him with so much contempt that he felt himself bristle in spite of whatever else it was he was feeling, the stupid need to go to her and wipe her face dry, and what he said came out almost mean. "Dude, seriously. What's going on with you today?"

"You have no right to stand in front of me and ask me what's wrong," she said, gearing up and recoiling like a big vicious snake. How many defense mechanisms could one woman have? And it pissed him off, because he wasn't some stupid kid who just wandered into the elevator with her. He wasn't just some fucking intern. He was a guy who cared about her, who fucking held her while he slept, and she had no right to stand there and treat him like a stranger.

"Don't do that," he said.

"Do what?"

"That thing. Where you push me away." It was really pissing him off, the way she kept drawing lines between them. How thick were they going to get before they were on different continents altogether? She met his eyes in defiance, and what was it _exactly_ that he'd done that he was having to pay penance for?

But then he started to get it a little—maybe it wasn't about him. Maybe it was just about Addison. Maybe she was pushing him away because she was so damned determined to be so damned strong all the time, and he could get that. He got it because he did it too, but he also knew how lonely a life that made. And he knew exactly how that story always ended, because he'd been writing it for years. It ended up with him, alone, and her alone, and if they both had to be alone, he didn't see the problem in doing it together.

And that was why, when she told him she didn't want him anywhere near her, he just wasn't going to let her push him away. He wasn't going to cater to her need to be the strongest person in the room—because fuck that. Fuck that. They could both be the strongest and the weakest and the best and the most fucked up people in the elevator. And he wasn't going to give up on her.

So when she crossed the small space to push the button to get the elevator moving again, he stopped her. He wasn't perfect. She wasn't perfect. And what they had wasn't perfect. What they had hadn't even matured into the kind of heavy-breathing can't-stop-thinking-about-you-thing that would drive them both crazy, but it didn't stop Alex from thinking about her all the time or wondering if she was doing okay or just wanting to see her smile his way. He was okay with that too—for the first time in all his crazy, fucked-up life, he was okay with it. With being open and bare enough to someone else that she could take a scalpel and slice his chest down the center.

So maybe they were both a little bloodied and bruised from life. It didn't mean they had to bloody and bruise each other too.

He had to touch her, so he did. It was as easy as that. The logic was flawless. He put one hand on her face and the other on her hip, and she told him to get his hands off of her. He moved his hand to the other side of the face and he told her just what he'd been thinking—that she didn't have to be so strong all the fucking time. And that was when she broke in his arms, the strongest woman he'd ever met. It wasn't triumph. It didn't even make him feel good that she was letting him hold her. It wasn't about winning or losing or pushing her into a corner. It was just what they were supposed to do. It's what people in _things_ did.

Her tears shook him. Not physically, because he had to be strong enough to hold her, but inside, where he was a little scared he was falling for her. There were a thousand things to say, but he couldn't come up with any of them. He dismissed every fleeting thing that hit his brain at a hundred miles per hour, like that she was beautiful, or that she drove him fucking crazy, or that he couldn't do this again, because it was so dramatic, but that was life—life was dramatic, and sometimes it ended, and sometimes it left surgeons, shaking and terrified, crying in elevators. And he wanted to tell her that she didn't have to be alone—that she had a choice. Most of all he wanted to press his mouth to her ear and tell her that he was scared out of his fucking mind, but it was the good kind of scared. He couldn't come up with any of it, not in words that didn't sound like bullshit, so he tightened his arm around her as much as he could without breaking her—but she wasn't breakable. She wasn't made of glass. She wasn't porcelain. She was real and warm and sobbing in his arms, and she kept him from having to say anything by kissing him.

And it scared him too that she let herself be here like this with him. It scared him that she might feel some ounce for him what she felt for her. It fucked him up a little, but maybe that was how all of this was supposed to be—a little unnerving, a little like falling, a little like stumbling.

But when she pulled away, it was like the sting of removing surgical gloves. No pain at all, just the cold shock of air to skin. Her fingers brushed over his lips, and he had to keep from kissing them, and what she said made no sense, not in the context of the way she was looking at him. "No, we can't. We can't do this. I can't do this, Alex."

"Yes, you can," he said, because it was time for her to start dealing.

"No." She started to stand up, pulling herself out of his arms, and up he went with her, and when she said the single-syllable word again, he saw that she really meant it. "We can't do this," she said, and there was a shutting-off in her eyes, a closing-down, like she'd moved on in the last four seconds without sending a memo his way.

He could only fight so hard. And he'd never known how to fight for a woman who didn't want to be fought for. "What the hell," he said, and the problem was he just didn't get it. Maybe there was nothing to get. Maybe he'd been right all along—that he was her rebound, that she was using him to get over Sloan or Shepherd or her baby, or whatever the hell else there was, and he could imagine just how angry she'd be if he made that accusation, but maybe there was truth in denial. "You and I, we make sense. What is this even about?"

"This is about the on-call room, Karev," she said, and everything about her was the cold surgical cauterization of her wounds that he hated.

"The on-call room?" What the hell did the on-call room have to do with anything? Was this more of the same we-can't-do-this-in-public bullshit she'd been feeding him for the last twelve hours? "When you and I—"

Dude, his brain went. Dude. You are such a moron.

Izzie and Sloan.

"Oh," he said. "You mean Izzie."

And that was jealousy, big and black and really fucking ugly, and it had taken up its residency in his chest and was doing pre-rounds and telling him to go fuck himself, because this was one woman he was never going to get. This was a woman who didn't belong to him, and she never would.

And Addison said _nothing_. She just stared at him, eyes narrowed with anger, rimmed with the blackness of her eye makeup, and he knew how angry and jealous he sounded when he said, "What does that have to do with anything? Unless—unless you're still—" He couldn't even say it.

It was worse than it had been with Denny, the jealousy. It was worse than any jealousy he'd ever had before, and the idea of Sloan all over Addison with his hands and his mouth and whatever else threatened to push Alex over the edge, along with the monster underneath his breastplate, and he had been such a God-damned fool. Such a miserable, played idiot. "You know," he said, before she could say anything else, "I totally get it now. So just—whatever. Forget the whole thing."

And just like that, it was done.

…

When he finally got back to his locker and the t-shirt was sitting there in front of it like a gold medal he failed to win, like the black eye someone else had given him, he went to go throw it away. But the thing was—it still smelled like her, and maybe that was all he'd ever get from this, the memory of her in his bed and whatever traces of her she'd left on his shirt, a long red hair here or there, and so he changed his mind about throwing it away and slid it into his locker instead.

To be continued.


End file.
